PESHAWAR: A surge in the arrest of parents refusing vaccination of their children in various districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is likely to leave an adverse impact on the anti-polio campaign widely publicised in the past.

The officials concerned told Dawn that the people didn’t know about the concept of polio eradication and spread false rumours about vaccination but intimidating parents wasn’t appropriate.

They said district coordination officers wanted to address vaccination refusals using administrative ways under instructions from the chief secretary as the province was committed to stopping poliovirus circulation in December this year.

The officials said DCOs rightly used the law against parents to make them agree on vaccination as they had no other way to serve the purpose.

They said the anti-polio campaign launched two decades ago had been marred by vaccination refusals on religious grounds.

The officials said vaccination rendered incapable the recipients to produce children was a long-held argument by opponents but experts believed the move would harm anti-polio campaigns.

They said the people had often insisted vaccinators went from door to door against polio but didn’t care for other diseases and that the arrests would give credence to the anti-vaccination people who said it was a foreign-sponsored programme to curtail the population of Muslims.

The officials said some parents complained that their children were given OPV at home and in marketplace too in the same campaign.

They said technical experts didn’t approve of the series of arrests of people in connection with vaccination refusal, especially in areas where refusal rate was higher.

The officials said a few government employees also refused vaccination of children missed in campaign in the province as it was an uphill task to reach a handful of children who remained unimmunised due to inaccessibility of their areas or vaccination refusals.

They said around 30,000 children stayed unvaccinated affecting the campaign during which 5.6 million children were immunised.

The officials said administrations in Bannu, Peshawar, Lakki Marat and some other districts seized parents for refusing a government-run vaccination programme but experts said there should be a proper law to deal separately with vaccination.

They said in the past few months, the district governments had accorded attention to polio vaccination but they were required to follow the laid-down procedure.

The officials said with children coming and going through Peshawar city to parts of the country as well as Afghanistan, it risked cross-border transmission of polio.

They said arrests were common and widespread, which could only benefits anti-vaccination elements.

The officials said a child became paralysed for having all doses of OPV but missing intravenous injection would only serve propaganda against vaccination.

They said a targeted approach to tackle the clusters of vaccination refusals and missed vaccination cases through the police under MPO wasn’t a good omen for fight against polio.

The officials said refusals and missed children in the form of clusters were a threat to polio eradication.

They said the government had engaged religious people to help curtail vaccination refusals.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2016