Pakistan: Polio: where’s the urgency?

AS of today, anyone travelling beyond this country’s borders will have to, by the orders of the Pakistan government, produce a state-issued polio vaccination certificate or face being disallowed from travel. In this bland statement lies a world of extra burdens placed on travellers, massive additional pressure on state infrastructure and resources, and the fears of the rest of the world that because of Pakistan, the crippling virus will be reintroduced in the planet at large. The restrictive travel advisory was first suggested in 2011 by the Independent Monitoring Board for Polio Eradication, as strains of the virus specific to Pakistan started turning up in other countries. The world noted how the resistance to the vaccine went from refusals to more and more deadly attacks on polio workers. Even when, early last month, the situation became grave enough for WHO to issue a travel restriction advisory, the world deferred to Pakistan’s sovereignty: other than India, which made the decision several months ago, no other country has issued the warning that unvaccinated travellers from Pakistan will not be allowed to enter — even now, the world has the grace to allow this country time to clean up its act.

Where, then, is the urgency to take responsibility of affairs? With tens of thousands of passengers leaving through the airports, the government has reportedly set up polio vaccination counters which will make the long queues at airports an even worse nightmare. And, if any such counters have been set up at the land border crossings in Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, we have yet to hear of them. The government has issued a list of hospitals/medical centres where state-endorsed certificates are available after vaccination. But several such facilities have already run out of these vital pieces of paper. They have not been provided more and people are being turned away. Indeed, only in Islamabad is there a plan in evidence that would make it likely for the international traveller to easily be vaccinated. But then, that is typical of our governments, who feel their mandate refers to the capital alone.

It would have been natural for the government to initiate, in the run-up to today’s deadline, a large-scale advertising campaign telling people what exactly was required, where they should go, and what they should be aware of. This, too, is nowhere in evidence. Could the apathy be greater? Yet the fact that Pakistan must now face is that transmitting the polio virus to other countries is far too serious a matter for other governments to continue to be accommodating. The travel ban is already enforced; if we cannot take urgent steps to ramp up the child vaccination campaign and make vaccines accessible to all travellers, further unpleasant realities may await us.