Our ever creative CIA seems to really enjoy making long-term enemies out of potential allies.
A Pakistani official on Thursday slammed the CIA’s fake vaccination drive in 2011 for fueling distrust of polio eradication campaigns and driving “attacks on polio workers” as the country grapples with an outbreak of this highly infectious disease that is spiraling into a global emergency.
Speaking to reporters at a press briefing, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs took direct aim at the CIA’s false vaccination campaign, which was conducted as part of the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin and exposed by the Guardian in 2011.
Carefully step around the orange pool of "Sunshine Vaccine" for more dreadfulness >>
Pakistan on Thursday said the fake vaccination campaign conducted by United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ahead of the secret raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound in 2011 was one of the major reasons behind the rising number of polio cases in the country.
“Dr Shakil Afridi’s fake campaign has created doubts about vaccination drives among people,” Foreign Office Spokesperson Tasnim Aslam told reporters at her weekly news briefing on Thursday. “A fake campaign of vaccination was conducted in Pakistan in which the UN agencies were also used.”
Her remarks came in response to the recent international travel restrictions imposed on Pakistan by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the country’s failure to completely eradicate the polio virus.
And add to this a new skepticism towards health workers who actually DO want to help Pakistanis. Now kids are literally dying because of this unthinkably inhumane way of abusing trust in a way that will leave permanent wounds that just fester over time.
Revelations of the plot sparked skepticism and anger towards health workers legitimately attempting to administer vaccinations, causing them to be driven out of villages, banned by some Taliban factions, and attacked and killed at escalating rates. Local opposition to vaccination efforts remains a key barrier to broad administration of the vaccine.
Usman, a father of four living in a slum of Pakistan’s Bhains Colony, told FT Magazine that, because of the Abbottabad incident, he refused to vaccinate his son Musharaf. At the age of two, Musharaf became the first polio casualty of 2013. “If the incident in Abbottabad did not happen, and these rumors didn’t spread to us, we would have continued the vaccinations as we had been,” he said.
First polio casualty of 2013. Not the last.
Well, at least we got Bin Laden.
Maybe next time we won't have to do something so monstrously wrong in our quest for justice?