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Polio Eradiction Is Within Reach: Here's What It Will Take To Get There

We're in the last mile in the fight to eradicate polio, but progress is fragile. As long as the disease is a threat anywhere, it remains a threat everywhere. A look at how UNICEF and partners are working to reach every child with lifesaving polio vaccines.

In Kwango Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 5-year-olds Makiese, left, and Madinu brandish red cards after receiving their polio vaccinations. In August 2023, the Ministry of Health, with support from UNICEF and partners, launched the "Red Card Against Polio" campaign using the popularity of soccer to garner widespread community support for childhood vaccination, with the aim to "Kick polio out of DRC" and protect children from other vaccine-preventable diseases.

Since the introduction of the first polio vaccine in the 1950s, fully vaccinated children have been protected from the dangerous viral illness that attacks the nervous system, causing paralysis and sometimes death.

Today, polio is on the brink of eradication, but conflict, climate disasters, displacement and vaccine misinformation are hindering efforts to reach some of the world's most marginalized children with lifesaving vaccines.

On Nov. 7, 2023, UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan Fran Equiza gives a polio vaccine to a young boy who has just returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan with his family.

In 1988, a public-private partnership was formed to reach every child in every country with the polio vaccine. Led by national governments and supported by six core partners — UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) vaccinates over 400 million each year, maintaining 99 percent eradication in global polio.

After almost four decades of close collaboration, more than 3 billion children have been vaccinated. The wild poliovirus has been wiped out in much of the world — today, it's confined to a few districts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On Feb. 29, 2024, polio vaccinator Hafsat Mikauli 30, marks a girl's finger with a whiteboard marker to indicate she has received the polio vaccine in Makurdi Gagi, Sokoto South LGA, Sokoto Sate, Nigeria.

Thanks to the commitment of community health workers (CHWs), government leadership and GPEI partners, polio is poised to become the second disease to be declared eradicated, after smallpox. UNICEF and partners and will not rest until every child is protected.

In February 2024, a young girl shows her finger, marked to indicate she has received a polio vaccination near her home in Aden, Yemen, as part of a critical polio campaign, launched with support from UNICEF.

The poliovirus is transmitted from person to person or, less frequently, through contaminated food or water. To eliminate polio, every child in every household must receive multiple doses of the vaccine. Millions of "zero dose" children, those who have not received a single dose of the polio vaccine series, remain vulnerable.

On April 14, 2023 in Lahore, Punjab province, Pakistan, two vaccinators and a social mobilizer travel by boat to conduct an integrated outreach activity to vaccinate children in an area where the population lacks access to a nearby health facility.

In significantly under-immunized populations, a strain of polio related to the weakened live strain found in the oral vaccine can arise. The lower the population's immunity, the longer variants can survive, replicate and exchange genetic material to become more dangerous strains. Most of the recent cases have been recorded in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, northern Nigeria, south central Somalia and northern Yemen.

A fully immunized population will be protected against both wild and vaccine poliovirus strains.

On Nov. 7, 2023, two boys sit in the back of a truck at Afghanistan's Torkham border with Pakistan in eastern Nangarhar province. Since September 2023, thousands of Afghans living in Pakistan have returned to Afghanistan through the Torkham crossing in Nangarhar province and the Spin Boldak crossing in Kandahar province. Around 60 percent of returning Afghans are children.

One of the greatest impediments to polio immunization is widespread mistrust of vaccines. Trained CHWs, the majority of whom are women, are the front line in reaching every child with lifesaving vaccines. In addition to administering vaccines to children ages 0 to 59 months, they dispel misconceptions and fears around vaccine efficacy.

Health care worker Hafsat Isah, center, speaks to nursing mothers who brought their children for vaccination in Kofan Rini PHC, Sokoto State, Nigeria, on March 5, 2023.

Many female health workers are mothers themselves; they build trust by sharing their experience vaccinating their own children. Women vaccinators can also enter households that may prohibit unrelated males from entering due to religious or cultural norms.

On April 18, 2023 in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan, Lady Health Worker (LHW) Shamim Hussain chats with a man and a child on a bicycle.

UNICEF and partners engage with governments and community leaders to enlist them as immunization advocates. Visible leadership participation in campaign launches and household visits reassures communities of vaccine safety.

In Mogadishu, Somalia on March 4, 2024, a community leader, center, spoke with representatives from UNICEF, the Ministry of Health, Banadir Regional Administration (BRA) and WHO, who visited polio campaigns and went house-to-house in Dheriyaale Singaale IDP camp in the Hodan District, with health mobilizers to ensure children received the lifesaving polio vaccine.

Ensuring every child under 5 receives multiple rounds of vaccines requires supply chain management and procurement and distribution capability that only UNICEF offers. UNICEF leverages its unrivaled supply chain and cold storage capability to procure and distribute more than 1 billion doses annually.

A drone carrying polio vaccines from Matawale Health Center lands at Magomero Health Center in Zomba, southern Malawi on July 14, 2023.

Once vaccines are procured and designated for specific clinics and communities, health workers use any conveyance necessary to cover the terrain between vulnerable children and vaccine administration.

With diligence and determination, they reach the most remote areas and large populations of people traveling within countries and across borders.

On Nov. 7, 2023, vaccinator Sayed Nasrullah Atayee, carrying a cold box full of vaccines, sets out by motorcycle from Layaba Basic Health Clinic in Layaba village, Fayzabad district, Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan.

Beyond the elimination of the poliovirus, in many areas, GPEI has developed an infrastructure that strengthens local health systems and provides a blueprint for other disease outbreaks and public health crises. Without vaccination campaigns, the under-5 mortality target for SDG 3: Ensuring good health and well-being for all at all ages cannot be met.

Many public health systems now have a highly skilled workforce that can break down cultural barriers and build trust in immunization and routine health activities. Resources previously spent on polio activities can be invested in other critical health and nutrition interventions for children.

A UNICEF-supported vaccination team crosses a bridge over the Ulindi River in South Kivu province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, to vaccinate children against polio on August 14, 2023.

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Ohio Board Reinstates License Of Doctor Who Made Controversial Claims About COVID Vaccines

Published May 6, 2024 at 5:50 PM EDT

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The State Medical Board of Ohio has reinstated the license of a doctor who got national attention for her anti-vaccine testimony before an Ohio House committee in 2021.

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny testified for a Republican-sponsored bill that was never voted out of committee. It would have banned all mandatory vaccines, including childhood inoculations like measles and polio. Tenpenny is known as an anti-vaccine activist who has spread conspiracy theories through her podcast and website. She was named as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" spreading almost two-thirds of anti‑vaccine content on social media, according to a nonprofit anti-hate organization focused on digital platforms.

In that 2021 hearing before the Ohio House Health Committee, Tenpenny made several unsubstantiated and wild claims about COVID vaccines, including this one: "There has been people who've long suspected that there was some sort of an interface and get to be defined in the interface between what's being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers. Not proven yet."

In fact, that's never been proven.

She also falsely claimed people receiving the COVID vaccine became "magnetized" and that the vaccine causes several serious health conditions, including in people who weren't vaccinated.

Tenpenny's testimony was mocked by many on social media but was supported by some others who opposed the COVID-19 vaccines. Hundreds of complaints were filed with the state medical board, which opened an investigation.

A spokesperson for the State Medical Board of Ohio said Tenpenny's license was suspended last August for failing to cooperate with the investigation, but she has now met the conditions for reinstatement.

"Sherri Tenpenny has met the Medical Board's conditions for reinstatement including, submission of an application for reinstatement, payment of her fine, and certification of cooperation with the board's investigation to date. As a result, during the April 10, 2024, board meeting, the board voted to reinstate Sherri Tenpenny's license, effective upon the processing of documents," said the spokesperson in an email.

Among those voting for the reinstatement of Tenpenny's license was Republican former attorney general and auditor Betty Montgomery, who clarified that her vote to reinstate was a "reluctant yes."

The True Tragedy Of The Covid-19 Vaccines

Vaccination is one of mankind's most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, and the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions, mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of lives. New jabs against malaria and melanoma promise great benefits. All the more reason to worry that Covid vaccines may have tarnished the technology's reputation.

Vaccines never have been without some side-effects and risks. They are harm-reduction interventions, not harm-elimination ones. Mistakes have been made in the past. Some polio jabs in the 1960s were contaminated with the monkey virus SV40. Vaccination campaigns in Africa that re-used needles may have helped spread HIV.

The Covid jabs developed in 2020 undoubtedly reduced the severity of the virus for vulnerable people and contributed to the defeat of the pandemic – though the evolutionary replacement of harmful variants by the milder omicron types may have been a bigger factor. But the vaccines were not as effective or as safe as we were led to believe at first.

Indeed, some public health officials exaggerated the benefits and underplayed some of the risks. Thrombosis caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine and myocarditis caused by the messenger-RNA vaccines of BioNTech and Pfizer have emerged as rare but serious side effects. The pandemic's legacy now seems to include greater public mistrust of vaccines in general. Measles is on the rise. More people are refusing the MMR jab. A recent Unicef survey found that vaccine confidence had fallen in 52 out of 55 countries.

Who is responsible? Public health officials tend to blame antivaxx campaigners with lurid conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, and they are partly right. But perhaps they should also look in the mirror. Misinformation came from both sides, and by overpromising what the vaccines could do, and demanding vaccine mandates, many scientists and government officials contributed to scepticism.

For example, the US government tried to reassure people about messenger-RNA vaccines by implicitly criticising live vaccines like those used for measles: "The mRNA vaccines do not contain any live virus. Instead, they work by teaching our cells to make a harmless piece of a 'spike protein'." So, live vaccines are not "harmless"?

America's leading infectious-disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said in May 2021 that vaccination "makes it extremely unlikely – not impossible, but very, very low likelihood – that they're going to transmit it … In other words, you become a dead end to the virus." That turned out to be wrong, as he later admitted, with the jab doing little to prevent reinfection and transmission.

Preventing transmission was the excuse used for vaccinating children, yet when that excuse evaporated, the policy continued. For young age groups, wrote a clutch of doctors in the BMJ in December 2021, "the harms of taking a vaccine are almost certain to outweigh the benefits".

Authoritarianism made the problem worse. France criminalised criticism of vaccine mandates; Canada froze the bank accounts of truckers for protesting against them. Part of the reason governments were so reckless in forcing vaccines was probably that they wanted an exit from lockdowns, which were imposed for longer and more often than promised.

Some of us urged ministers not to claim too much for vaccines or pretend there would be no side effects as that would backfire. But the Government pressed ahead with mandates to prevent care-home workers going to work unless vaccinated. A study by doctors concluded: "Our data suggest that debate around mandates can arouse strong concerns and could entrench scepticism. Policymakers should proceed with caution."

This was compounded by a baffling refusal to acknowledge that natural immunity from Covid itself had a role in protecting people. In 2020 a paper in The Lancet stated that "there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection". Yet we now know that it lasts longer and is more effective than the protection provided by a jab.

The backlash against vaccines will go too far. Italy's former health minister Roberto Speranza, who imposed vaccine mandates, can no longer walk in a street without angry Italians calling him a murderer. But public health officials worldwide must concede that overblown claims and underestimated risks of the vaccines developed during Covid have hurt the reputation of a valuable medical technology.

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