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Comment by _djo_ | Hacker News Reader

This is likely the result of two factors. First, families skipping scheduled vaccinations for their newborns out of fear of catching COVID-19 at clinics: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/tackling-malawis-fears-rou...

And second, as a result of anti-vaccine disinformation, largely spread from the US, Europe, and Russia, that has been reaching increasingly internet-connected African communities via Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media.

https://www.africanews.com/2021/11/23/vaccine-skepticism-hit...

https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/foreign-anti-va...

It's probably going to get worse.

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US government actions are probably also to blame for the cases in Afghanistan & Pakistan. The CIA setup a fake vaccination clinic in their effort to catch Bin Laden [1].

Another factor is just that eradicating polio with the current vaccines is hard. The oral vaccine mutates in around one in a million cases to become effectively wild polio (some years this accounts for most of the polio cases). The fully inactivated injected version is non-sterilizing: it prevents poliomyelitis but still allows for gut infection: eradicating the disease but not the virus.

[1] https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/25135

> US government actions are probably also to blame for the cases in Afghanistan & Pakistan. The CIA setup a fake vaccination clinic in their effort to catch Bin Laden [1].

So, I agree that this is obviously a heinous thing to do because of the unintended consequences that we are now going to be dealing with forever, but I understand the motivation.

With that said, Out of all the evil shit that has come out of CIA why did knowledge of this one become public and why did it become public so soon?

We wouldnt be facing these issues if someone had just kept their damn mouth shut.

>With that said, Out of all the evil shit that has come out of CIA why did knowledge of this one become public and why did it become public so soon?

Because it wasn't a "fake" vaccination clinic. They legitimately vaccinated people. And the shared it because they didn't see much wrong with it "look at the good we were doing while trying to find Bin-Laden" or something like that.

Basically the people who decided whether to make that stuff public deal in so much heinous stuff they didn't see how the public might not like their vaccine shenanigans.

The CIA didn't decide to make it public; the Pakistanis discovered it during their post-raid investigation.

Regardless of which party broke the news the CIA had no problem talking about it like it was a good thing back when they were boasting about all the I's they dotted and T's they crossed to make sure "this ways the guy" prior to the raid.

Sorry, this is simply not true.

Anti-polio-vaccination has been endemic in the region for so many decades. Long before the US proxy war in Afghanistan against the USSR.

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