PThe eradication of Olio has largely been a global vaccination success story. The disease, which can cause paralysis or death, mainly in children, now circulates only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the front line of the polio eradication effort is Dr. Shahzad Baig, national coordinator of Pakistan’s polio eradication program. In 2019, polio disabled or killed 147 people in Pakistan; Since Baig took office in 2021, case counts have plummeted, with only six children knitting in 2023. The goal is to reduce that number to zero by 2026.
In the run-up to the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, The CIA organized a fake door-to-door vaccination campaign. in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden lived, to collect DNA samples from his family and confirm his whereabouts. That helped exacerbate existing rumors that polio vaccines were a Western ruse to sterilize Muslim girls. which led to the murder of more than 200 workers vaccinated against polio by Islamist extremists between 2012 and 2016. But Baig has declared that the days of extremists expelling polio workers are over. Under his leadership, the government has deployed 400,000 vaccinators and 80,000 security personnel to vaccinate more than 90 million children this year alone, with another 24 million coming in a spring vaccination campaign.
Before going to work in Pakistan, Baig was a technical advisor to Nigeria’s polio eradication effort, which was spectacularly successful: in 2020, the country became the most recent country in the world to be declared polio-free. If Baig has his way, Pakistan will be next.