Background

Pakistan is one of two countries left where wild poliovirus remains endemic. Polio eradication seems an almost impossible task in Pakistan, largely in part because of the vaccine refusals in the Pashtun communities due to their misbeliefs surrounding them. Pashtuns account for 75% of Pakistan’s polio cases even though they are only 15% of the population. They believe the polio vaccines to be a Western propaganda aimed at destroying them, with deep-rooted misperceptions from them not being halal, them making their children sterile to the vaccines causing children to become sick or die. Because of these conservative beliefs, they distrust any outsider, due to which all efforts have faced harsh resistance where polio workers have often been killed in the past.