Politics
Polio was nearly eradicated. Here’s why it’s making a comeback – National TenX News
For the past decade, Sughra Ayaz has traveled door to door in southeastern Pakistan, pleading with parents to allow children to be vaccinated against polio as part of a global campaign to wipe out the paralytic disease. She hears their demands and fears. Some are practical – families need basics like food and water more than vaccines. Others are simply unfounded – the oral doses are meant to sterilize their kids.
Amid rampant misinformation and immense pressure for the campaign to succeed, Ayaz said, some managers have instructed workers to falsely mark children as immunized. And the vaccines, which must be kept cold, aren’t always stored correctly, she added.
“In many places, our work is not done with honesty,” Ayaz said.
The World Health Organization and partners embarked on their polio campaign in 1988 with the bold goal of eradication — a feat seen only once for human diseases, with smallpox in 1980. They came close several times, including in 2021, when just five cases of the natural virus were reported in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But since then, cases rebounded, hitting 99 last year, and officials have missed at least six self-imposed eradication deadlines.
Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the only countries where transmission of polio — which is highly infectious, affects mainly children under five, and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours — has never been interrupted. The worldwide campaign has focused most of its attention and funding there for the past decade.
But in its quest to eliminate the disease, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative has been derailed by mismanagement and what insiders describe as blind allegiance to an outdated strategy and a problematic oral vaccine, according to workers, polio experts and internal materials obtained by The Associated Press.
Officials have falsified vaccination records, selected unqualified people to dole out drops, failed to send out teams during mass campaigns, and dismissed concerns about the oral vaccine sparking outbreaks, according to documents shared with AP by staffers from GPEI – one of the largest and most expensive public health campaigns in history, with over $20 billion spent and nearly every country in the world involved.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan – which share a border, harbor widespread mistrust of vaccines, and have weakened healthcare systems and infrastructure – local staffers like Ayaz have for years flagged problems to senior managers. But those issues, along with concerns by staffers and outside health officials, have long gone unaddressed, insiders say.
Officials tout the successes – three billion children vaccinated, an estimated 20 million people who would have been paralyzed spared – while acknowledging challenges in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remote villages are hard to reach, some cultural and religious authorities instruct against vaccination, and hundreds of polio workers and security staff have been killed because of their alignment with a Western-led initiative.
Dr. Jamal Ahmed, WHO’s polio director, defended progress in those two countries, citing workers’ tailored response in resistant pockets.
“There’s so many children being protected today because of the work that was done over the past 40 years,” he said. “Let’s not overdramatize the challenges, because that leads to children getting paralyzed.”
Ahmed said he believes authorities will end the spread of polio in the next 12 to 18 months. Its latest goal for eradication is 2029. The campaign says about 45 million children in Pakistan and 11 million in Afghanistan must be vaccinated this year. Children typically need four doses of two drops each to be considered fully immunized.
Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, who has served on advisory groups for WHO, the Gates Foundation and others, said campaign officials should listen to the criticism of its tactics.
“Continuing blindly with the same strategies that we have relied on since eradication began is unlikely to lead to a different result,” he said.
Documents show yearslong problems on polio vaccination teams
Internal WHO reports reviewing vaccination drives in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past decade – given to AP by current and former staffers – show that as early as 2017, local workers were alerting significant problems to senior managers.
The documents flagged multiple cases of falsified vaccination records, health workers being replaced by untrained relatives and workers improperly administering vaccines.
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On numerous occasions, WHO officials noted, “vaccinators did not know about vaccine management,” citing failure to keep doses properly cold. They also found sloppy or falsified reporting, with workers noting “more used vaccine vials than were actually supplied.”
According to an August 2017 report from Kandahar, Afghanistan, local government authorities and others interfered in choosing vaccinators, “resulting in the selection of underage and illiterate volunteers.”
Vaccination teams worked “in a hurried manner,” reports said, with “no plan for monitoring or supervision.” A team in Nawzad, Afghanistan, covered just half of the intended area in 2017, with 250 households missed entirely. Village elders said no one visited for at least two years.
Vaccine workers and health officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan confirmed the issues in the documents and told AP it’s hard for campaign leadership to grasp the difficulties in the field. Door-to-door efforts are stymied by cultural barriers, unfounded stories about vaccines, and the region’s poverty and transience.
“Most of the time when we go to vaccinate and knock on the door, the head of the house or the man is not at home,” said one worker, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press. “Many people find it offensive that a stranger knocks on the door and talks to a woman.”
Some workers find families have moved. Occasionally, they say, the encounter abuse.
“We have shared these problems with our senior officials,” the worker told AP. “They know about it.”
In an email response to AP’s questions about officials’ knowledge of the issues, WHO polio director Ahmed noted “operational challenges” in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said the program has “robust monitoring and evaluation processes.”
Worker Ayaz described “fake finger marking” — placing the ink used to show a child is vaccinated on their pinky even when no vaccine has been given.
“There is so much pressure,” Ayaz said.
Critics point to continued use of the oral polio vaccine
Before the first polio vaccine was developed in 1955, the disease — spread mostly from person to person, through contaminated water and via fecal particles — was among the world’s most feared, paralyzing hundreds of thousands of children annually. People avoided crowded places during epidemics, and hospital wards filled with children encased in iron lungs after the virus immobilized their breathing muscles.
Polio is mainly spread when people are exposed to water infected with the virus. In countries with poor sanitation, children often become infected when they come into contact with contaminated waste.
WHO says that as long as a single child remains infected, kids everywhere are at risk.
Eradication demands near-perfection – zero polio cases and immunizing more than 95 per cent of children.
But public health leaders and former WHO staffers say campaign efforts are far from perfect, and many question the oral vaccine.
The oral vaccine – proven to be safe and effective — has been given to more than three billion children. But there are some extremely rare side effects: Scientists estimate that for every 2.7 million first doses given, one child will be paralyzed by the live polio virus in the vaccine.
In even rarer instances, the live virus can mutate into a form capable of starting new outbreaks among unimmunized people where vaccination rates are low.
Worldwide, several hundred vaccine-derived cases have been reported annually since at least 2021, with at least 98 this year.
Most public health experts agree the oral vaccine should be pulled as soon as possible. But they acknowledge there simply isn’t enough injectable vaccine — which uses no live virus and doesn’t come with the risks of the oral vaccine — to wipe out polio alone. The injectable vaccine also is more expensive and requires more training to administer.
More than two dozen current and former senior polio officials told AP the agencies involved haven’t been willing to even consider revising their strategy to account for some of the campaign’s problems.
Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who sits on an independent board reviewing polio eradication, said it would be impossible to eliminate polio without the oral vaccine. But he’s urged authorities to find ways to adapt, such as adopting new methods to identify polio cases more quickly. Since 2011, he and colleagues have issued regular reports about overall program failures.
“There’s no management,” he said, citing a lack of accountability.
Last year, former WHO scientist Dr. T. Jacob John twice emailed WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calling for a “major course correction.” John shared the emails with AP and said he’s received no response.
“WHO is persisting with polio control and creating polio with one hand and attempting to control it by the other,” John wrote.
In his response to AP, WHO polio director Ahmed said the oral vaccine is a “core pillar” of eradication strategy and that “almost every country that is polio-free today used (it) to achieve that milestone.”
“We need to step back and really care for the people,” he said. “The only way we can do that in large parts of the world is with oral polio vaccine.”
Ahmed also pointed to the success WHO and partners had eliminating polio from India, once considered a nearly impossible task. In the four years before polio was wiped out there, health workers delivered about 1 billion doses of the oral vaccine to more than 170 million children.
Today, nearly all of the world’s polio cases — mostly in Africa and the Middle East — are mutated viruses from the oral vaccine, except for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Scott Barrett, a Columbia University professor, called for an inquiry into how things went so wrong – particularly with a failed effort in 2016, when authorities removed a strain from the oral vaccine. They miscalculated, leading to outbreaks in more than 40 countries that paralyzed more than 3,000 children, according to an expert report commissioned by WHO. Last year, a mutated virus traced to that effort paralyzed a baby in Gaza.
“Unless you have a public inquiry where all the evidence comes out and WHO makes serious changes, it will be very hard to trust them,” he said.
Mistrust of the polio eradication effort persists
With an annual budget of about $1 billion, the polio initiative is among the most expensive in all of public health. This year, the U.S. withdrew from WHO, and President Donald Trump has cut foreign aid. WHO officials have privately admitted that sustaining funding would be difficult without success.
Some say the money would be better spent on other health needs.
“We have spent more than $1 billion (in external polio funding) in the last five years in Pakistan alone, and it didn’t buy us any progress,” said Roland Sutter, who formerly led polio research at WHO. “If this was a private company, we would demand results.”
Villagers, too, have protested the cost, staging hundreds of boycotts of immunization campaigns since 2023. Instead of polio vaccines, they ask for medicine, food and electricity.
In Karachi, locals told AP they didn’t understand the government’s fixation on polio and complained of other issues — dirty water, heroin addiction. Workers are accompanied by armed guards; Pakistani authorities say more than 200 workers and police assigned to protect them have been killed since the 1990s, mostly by militants.
The campaign also is up against a wave of misinformation, including that the vaccine is made from pig urine or will make children reach puberty early. Some blame an anti-vaccine sentiment growing in the U.S. and other countries that have largely funded eradication efforts and say it’s reaching even remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In suburban southwest Pakistan, Saleem Khan, 58, said two grandchildren under five were vaccinated over his family’s objections.
“It results in disability,” said Khan, without citing evidence for his belief. “They are vaccinated because officials reported our refusal to authorities and the police.”
Svea Closser, professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University, said Pakistan and Afghanistan were less resistant to immunization decades ago. Now, people are angry about the focus on polio and lack of help for diseases like measles or tuberculosis, she said, spurring conspiracy theories.
“Polio eradication has created a monster,” Closser said. It doesn’t help, she added, that in this region, public trust in vaccine campaigns was undermined when the CIA organized a fake hepatitis drive in 2011 in an attempt to get DNA and confirm the presence of Osama bin Laden or his family.
Workers see that continued mistrust every day.
In a mountainous region of southeastern Afghanistan where most people survive by growing wheat and raising cows and chickens, a mother of five said she’d prefer that her children be vaccinated against polio, but her husband and other male relatives have instructed their families to reject it. They believe the false rumors that it will compromise their children’s fertility.
“If I allow it,” the woman said, declining to be named over fears of family retribution, “I will be beaten and thrown out.”
—Cheng reported from London.
Politics
Israel soon will halt or slow aid to northern Gaza as military offensive grows – National TenX News
Israel will soon halt or slow humanitarian aid into parts of northern Gaza as it expands its military offensive against Hamas, an official said Saturday, a day after Gaza City was declared a combat zone.
The decision was likely to bring more condemnation of Israel’s government as frustration grows in the country and abroad over dire conditions for both Palestinians and remaining hostages in Gaza after nearly 23 months of war.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told The Associated Press that Israel will stop airdrops over Gaza City in the coming days and reduce the number of aid trucks arriving in the north as it prepares to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people south.
Israel on Friday ended recently imposed daytime pauses in fighting to allow aid delivery, describing Gaza City as a Hamas stronghold and alleging that a tunnel network remains in use, despite previous large-scale raids. The United Nations and partners have said the pauses, airdrops and other measures fell far short of the 600 trucks of aid needed daily in Gaza.
A ‘massive population movement’ coming
AP video footage showed several large explosions across Gaza overnight. Israel’s military Saturday evening said it had struck a key Hamas member in the area of Gaza City, with no details.
In recent days, Israel’s military has increased strikes on the outskirts of Gaza City, where famine was recently documented and declared by global food security experts.
By Saturday there had been no airdrops for several days across Gaza, a break from almost daily ones. Israel’s army didn’t respond to a request for comment or say how it would provide aid to Palestinians during another major shift in Gaza’s population of over 2 million people.
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“Such an evacuation would trigger a massive population movement that no area in the Gaza Strip can absorb, given the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and the extreme shortages of food, water, shelter and medical care,” Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement.
It’s impossible that a mass evacuation of Gaza City can be done in a safe and dignified way, she said.
Hundreds of residents have begun leaving Gaza City, piling their remaining possessions onto pickup trucks or donkey carts. Many have been forced to leave their homes more than once.
Killed while seeking food
Israeli gunfire killed four people trying to get aid in central Gaza, according to health officials at Al-Awda Hospital, were the bodies were taken.
An Israeli strike on a bakery in Gaza City’s Nasr neighborhood killed 12 people including six women and three children, the Shifa Hospital director told the AP, and a strike on the Rimal neighborhood killed seven.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said another 10 people died as a result of starvation and malnutrition over the past 24 hours, including three children. It said at least 332 Palestinians have died from malnutrition-related causes during the war, including 124 children.
At least 63,371 Palestinians have died in Gaza during the war, said the ministry, which does not say how many are fighters or civilians but says around half have been women and children. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own.
“There is no food and even water is not available. When it is available, it is not safe to drink,” said Amer Zayed, as he waited for food from a charity kitchen in Deir al-Balah on Friday.
“The suffering gets worse when there are more displaced people,” he added.
Israelis rally again to demand a ceasefire deal
Israelis waited to hear the identity of the remains of a hostage that Israel on Friday said had been recovered in Gaza. It also said it recovered the remains of hostage Ilan Weiss.
Forty-eight hostages now remain in Gaza of the over 250 seized in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that sparked the war. Israel had believed 20 are still alive.
Their loved ones fear the expanding military offensive will put them in even more danger, and they were rallying again Saturday to demand a ceasefire deal to bring everyone home.
“Netanyahu, if another living hostage comes back in a bag, it will not only be the hostages and their families who pay the price. You will bear responsibility for premeditated murder,” Zahiro Shahar Mor, nephew of hostage Avraham Munder, said in Tel Aviv.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
The Trump administration said Friday it was denying and revoking U.S. visas from members of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
That comes ahead of next month’s United Nations General Assembly, where Canada and several other countries have said they intend to officially recognize a Palestinian state.
The U.S. State Department cited the groups’ efforts to secure statehood recognition at the UN, along with their appeals to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice to investigate alleged Israeli crimes in Gaza, as reasons for the decision by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Both steps materially contributed to Hamas’s refusal to release its hostages, and to the breakdown of the Gaza ceasefire talks,” the department said in a statement.
“The Trump Administration has been clear: it is in our national security interests to hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments, and for undermining the prospects for peace.”
The statement did not name the officials being denied entry. It was not immediately clear if the list included Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was expected to travel to New York for the UN gathering.
The Palestinians’ ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, told reporters at the UN headquarters that they were checking exactly what the U.S. move means “and how it applies to any of our delegation, and we will respond accordingly.”
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Representatives assigned to the Palestinian Authority mission at the UN, led by Mansour, will be granted waivers so they can continue their New York-based operations, the U.S. statement said.
Mansour said Abbas still intends to lead the delegation to the high-level meetings and is expected to address the General Assembly — as he has done for many years — and to attend a meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 22 on a two-state solution co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.
U.S. President Donald Trump will travel to New York and address the general assembly on Sept. 23, the White House said on Thursday.
Canada, Britain, Australia and France in recent weeks have announced or signalled their intention to recognize a Palestinian state during the meeting.
The countries have said their recognition is conditional on the Palestinian Authority — which has limited self-rule over parts of the occupied West Bank and has for years been positioning itself as a legitimate government alternative to Hamas in Gaza — undergoing reforms and new elections.
Abbas has signalled he will co-operate with the Western nations’ demands.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization is an internationally recognized coalition that represents Palestinian people in its occupied territories and abroad.
The Trump administration has staunchly backed Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. The U.S. has also refused to condemn expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Canada and other allies have said undermine two-state solution efforts.
Rubio hosted Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar in Washington on Wednesday “to reaffirm our two nations’ close cooperation,” the U.S. secretary said in a post on X.
Saar, asked after the meeting what the plan was for a Palestinian state, said there would not be any.
The Israeli minister on Friday thanked Rubio for holding the PA and PLO “accountable for rewarding terrorism, incitement and efforts to use legal warfare against Israel” in a social media statement.
Officials with the Palestinian Authority reject that they’ve undermined peace prospects.
Under the 1947 UN “headquarters agreement,” the U.S. is generally required to allow access for foreign diplomats to the UN in New York. But Washington has said it can deny visas for security, terrorism and foreign policy reasons.
Hamas earlier this month said it had accepted a U.S.-backed proposal on a ceasefire in Gaza that would see the release of some hostages in exchange for talks with Israel that would end the conflict and see the return of all remaining hostages.
But Israel has said it will only accept the full return of all the hostages and has pressed ahead with a plan to occupy Gaza City, which international monitors like the UN have warned could worsen a famine already afflicting the Palestinian territory.
Rubio last week announced sanctions against multiple International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors involved in the court’s investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza and the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
—With files from Reuters
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Politics
Israel launches new offensive in Gaza, says remains of 2 hostages returned – National TenX News
Gaza City is now a dangerous combat zone, Israel says, adding that it is in the “initial stages” of a planned offensive that has drawn international condemnation.
Israel’s military said it suspended midday pauses to fighting, which had allowed food and aid supplies to enter from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. in Gaza’s largest city.
It also said it had recovered the body of a hostage and the remains of another, and vowed its military offensive would return more.
The shift comes weeks after Israel first announced plans to widen its offensive in Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering and enduring famine.
Father of hostage calls recovery operation a ‘bittersweet moment’
Israel’s recovery of more hostages Friday felt like a “stab in the stomach” for Rubi Chen, who believes his son is still in captivity in Gaza.
Israel said it had returned the body of one captive and the remains of another from Gaza Friday. It identified one as Ilan Weiss, a man killed in the initial Hamas attack.
“It’s a bittersweet moment that the Weiss family is reunited with their loved one, even though he’s coming back not as they would have wanted,” said Chen. “But at least they have closure … there are still 49 families waiting to have that closure.”
Chen said his family has received intelligence that his son did not survive the Oct. 7 attack but Hamas has not provided any information about his son’s whereabouts.
Netanyahu details hostage recovery operation
The Israeli prime minister said the body of a dead Israeli and the remains of another were recovered following an operation in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces and the country’s internal security service Shin Bet.
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Netanyahu said Friday one set of remains belongs to Ilan Weiss who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023 while defending Kibbutz Be’eri against attacking Hamas gunmen.
The remains of the second Israeli are now being examined for positive identification at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.
Weiss’ wife Shiri and daughter Noga, also kidnapped in the Hamas attack, were released from captivity in November 2023.
He has two other daughters.
The Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said the return of all hostages remains the “highest national priority” and urged the Israeli government to enter into negotiations “and stay at the table until every last hostage comes home.”
Israeli military says attack on Gaza City will intensify
A spokesman for the Israeli military says the country’s forces have started their attack on Gaza City which are operating “with great force” on the city’s outskirts.
Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-speaking spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, posted on X Friday that the military operation is in its initial phase, but that the Israeli military will “intensify our strikes” and “will not hesitate” until all Israeli hostages are returned and Hamas is dismantled “militarily and politically.”
Adraee said Israel is “not waiting” and is moving ahead with its attack against Hamas which has “transformed from a military organization into a defeated organization waging guerrilla warfare.”
The U.N.’s humanitarian agency said they were “deeply concerned” by the military’s statement that it would intensify its operation in Gaza City.
It predicted that the offensive would have a “horrific impact on people already exhausted, malnourished, bereaved, displaced, and deprived of basics needed for survival.”
It said UN and NGO teams would remain on the ground in Gaza City to provide life-saving support but maintained that its work would need to be facilitated.
Israel says hostage bodies recovered
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the body of Ilan Weiss of Kibbutz Be’eri and the remains of another unnamed hostage were returned to Israel.
“The campaign to return the hostages continues continuously. We will not rest or be silent until we return all of our hostages home — both the living and the dead,” Netanyahu said.
Israel on Friday said its military had recovered the bodies of two hostages, including an Israeli man who was killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war.
Of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas-led militants almost 22 months ago, roughly 50 remain in Gaza including 20 that Israel believes to be alive.
Israeli military begins Gaza City offensive
Israel declared Gaza’s largest city a dangerous combat zone and said it was in the ″initial stages″ of a planned offensive that has drawn international condemnation.
The suspension comes weeks after Israel first announced plans to widen its offensive in Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering and enduring famine.
440 people are now sheltering inside Gaza’s only Catholic church, spokesman says
A spokesman for Gaza’s only Catholic church said some 440 people who have taken shelter there had unanimously agreed to stay, despite word that Israel was preparing to mount a new military offensive in the Palestinian territory.
Farid Jubran told The Associated Press Friday that their decision to stay in Gaza City’s Holy Family Catholic Church was made of their own free will and “wasn’t imposed on the people.”
He said five clergy have also stayed in the church to assist those sheltering that include women, children and older people.
But Jubran, who is currently outside of Gaza, said it’s “up to them” if they want to leave the church at some point later.
The spokesman said there are no additional measures that have been taken inside the church to bolster the safety of the people.
He said “when we feel danger, people get closer to the walls or whatever, it’s more protected” but that the church “doesn’t have any specific defenses.”
© 2025 The Canadian Press
Israel soon will halt or slow aid to northern Gaza as military offensive grows – National TenX News
U.S. scraps Palestinian officials’ visas ahead of UN General Assembly – National TenX News
Israel launches new offensive in Gaza, says remains of 2 hostages returned – National TenX News
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