| If your kids are crippled because you're too religious to let them take the vaccine it's no skin off my fore. I'm past the point of feeling sorry for the primitives. |
The anti-polio campaign in NWFP suffered a severe setback following the unprecedented refusal of 70 percent of the provinceÂ’s population to take the vaccine. According to sources, the failure of the drive has been attributed to negative propaganda that the vaccine causes impotency in male children and triggers puberty in female children.An official of the provincial health ministry said that the three-day drive against the polio virus that ended on November 16 came at the worst possible time considering the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recently launched its campaign in the country, expecting a polio-free Pakistan by the year 2007. The official stated that a radio programme by a private FM channel a day before the drive was the reason behind the failure of the campaign. The anchorperson of the radio programme was fired the next day and the station lost all its advertisements from the drive, which were to be aired within the next three days.
Nabi, a senior member of the Peshawar High Court Bar Association (PHCBA), filed a case in the Peshawar High Court (PHC) demanding an end to the WHO-backed polio vaccination, saying that the vaccine contained two additional ingredients which had harmful side effects for children. Nabi claimed that WHO had failed to give reasons for the presence of two ingredients in the vaccine: Estrogen and Estradoil, which he said were not required to fight the disease. “I am not against the anti-polio effort, nor am I against family planning, but the recipients of the vaccine should know what is being administered to them,” he said.