Maulana Tayyab Qureshi, a top cleric in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has seen the devastating effects of polio firsthand.
Two of his own relatives were once paralyzed and refuse to leave Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, even though it has been eradicated around the world.
“If the parents had not neglected[vaccinating their children]their children would not be disabled now,” Qureshi said of her relatives.
As the chief khateeb (Friday prayer leader) of the northwestern province, Qureshi holds Friday sermons at the 17th-century Mahabat Khan Mosque in Peshawar, Eid prayers that gather for more than 40,000 people, and meetings with village elders. He preaches this message at every opportunity.
“I’m very clear. I tell them it’s free. There’s no cost to you. Why not give it some serious thought?” Qureshi said in an interview with VOA.
Qureshi is not the only Pakistani cleric to advocate vaccination. Several prominent scholars have issued statutes supporting it, and there has been a marked change in attitude. Vaccine hesitancy, an intractable obstacle to polio eradication, is waning, he said.
The Peshawar suburb, once a notorious hub of vaccine resistance, is now open to vaccinations.
“The fatwa had a huge impact,” Qureshi said.
But misinformation remains a major obstacle in Pakistan and Afghanistan’s efforts to eradicate polio. Vaccination rates are generally high in both countries, but resistance remains strong along the border, jeopardizing eradication efforts.
To counter vaccine misinformation, public health officials are increasingly turning to influential clerics like Qureshi. Experts say these religious leaders play an important role in dispelling harmful myths and misconceptions about vaccines, as trusted voices within their communities.
“The best way to overcome this problem is to empower trusted voices in the community to push back and provide real information,” said Kai Ruggeri, a professor of health policy at Columbia University and author of a book on vaccine disinformation. ” he said.
The stakes are high. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries where polio remains endemic. And as World Polio Day arrives this year, there are new concerns about our ability to eradicate the disease.
Neighboring countries were once on the brink of eradicating polio. However, persistent security insecurity coupled with cross-border movement is accelerating the resurgence.
This year, Pakistan has recorded 40 cases and Afghanistan has recorded at least 20 cases. This represents a significant increase from the six cases each reported last year.
A setback occurred last month when more than 1 million Pakistani children remained unvaccinated and the Afghan Taliban suspended its vaccination campaign.
Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesperson for WHO’s polio eradication program in Geneva, said misinformation is not the only obstacle to eradicating polio. Lack of infrastructure, insecurity and population density also play a role.
“The important point is that the poliovirus doesn’t care why children don’t get vaccinated,” Rosenbauer said in an interview. “They’re very good at finding unvaccinated children.”
Polio is a serious disease that can lead to paralysis and death, but it has long been eradicated worldwide thanks to universal immunization efforts. For most people around the world, polio is a distant memory, even a relic of history.
But in Afghanistan and Pakistan, despite significant progress in recent decades, the disease remains a harsh reality. The scars are obvious to anyone who looks at them, Rosenbauer said.
“It’s still a disease that my parents get,” he says. “If you walk around Karachi or Kabul, you will still see people infected with polio on the streets.”
This “respect for the disease” explains why vaccine hesitancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains at around 1.5%, significantly lower than in many Western countries.
But in densely populated areas, such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, lingering resistance could hamper efforts to eradicate the virus.
At the forefront of the anti-vaccination movement, extremists on both sides of the border have carried out violent attacks on polio workers and their escorts. Their claims that the vaccine program violates Islamic law and is being used for surveillance are fueling resistance.
FILE – A police officer, right, guards a health worker administering polio vaccine to a child near Peshawar, Pakistan, Sept. 9, 2024.
Hundreds of people were killed in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In January, a major attack on polio teams and security personnel in northwestern Pakistan left at least five police officers dead and more than a dozen injured.
According to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Emergency Operations Center, militants have carried out 21 attacks against polio teams and security personnel in Pakistan this year.
Mainstream clergymen objected.
In 2019, prominent Islamic scholars from Afghanistan and Pakistan declared the polio vaccine safe and compliant with Islamic law. They emphasized the “moral obligation” of parents to get their children vaccinated.
In 2022, Al-Azhar University, the Sunni Muslim world’s most prestigious religious educational institution, issued a warning against a law banning polio vaccines in Pakistan.
Last month, nearly 200 prominent religious scholars from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province expressed support for polio vaccination.
KP’s Sheikh Khateeb Qureshi was among them.
The academics “took a strong position on all health measures by the Ministry of Health, not just the polio vaccine,” Qureshi said.
Taliban health officials are waging their own campaign against vaccine misinformation across borders, despite continued attacks on health workers often claimed by ISIS.
FILE – A health worker administers polio vaccination to a child in the old city of Kabul, Afghanistan, March 29, 2021.
Ehsanul Haq Hanafi, a cleric and senior health ministry official, understands the influence of clerics in Afghan society.
“People listen to the words of the ulema and accept their words,” Hanafi said in an interview with VOA.
He said among the myriad misconceptions about vaccines, some Afghans believe that vaccines corrupt morals or cause infertility. Some people believe it may accelerate puberty.
“This is unscientific and baseless disinformation,” he said.
To counter this, Hanafi has been traveling around the country meeting with locals and mullahs to persuade skeptics. Although some clergy remain opposed, most would accept the vaccine if its benefits were explained to them, he said.
“We cannot convince 100% of the people, but 80% agree and are getting their children vaccinated,” Hanafi said.
VOA’s Ihsan M. Khan contributed to this article.
