PESHAWAR: The district administration and district health officers want control over the staff deployed by the partner agencies, including WHO and Unicef, to reassert the government’s role in the vaccination and eradication of polio.

“The UN staff should play second fiddle to the government in vaccination. They are currently in the driving seat,” senior public health experts said.

The administration and DHOs have been demanding powers to take action against UN staff for showing laxity in polio immunisation like they take against government employees involved in the campaign but such requests have not been responded. Recently provincial heads of the WHO and Unicef were replaced after continuous complaints by DCs and DHOs.

The experts said that DHOs should technically lead polio effort because they knew vaccines from production to import, transportation, storage and distribution besides its administration and side effects and epidemiology etc.

Commissioners and deputy commissioners complain against UN staff

Sources said that reservations had long been expressed against UN by the district and health administrations.

As the cases surged in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a meeting of DHOs was held with Health Minister Hisham Inamullah Khan in the chair on Monday, to ponder over the situation regarding polio vaccination. “The DHOs want lead role in polio campaign,” said sources.

Sources said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was the only province where UN agencies were involved in operations but their workers neither came under the DC nor the DHO, the administrative and technical heads of the polio eradication programme in the district.

Health Secretary Dr Syed Farooq Jamil said they wanted to assign lead role to DHOs through structural changes to make the programme more effective with special focus on Bannu division where the childhood ailment was endemic.

He said that finger marking, misconceptions by people regarding vaccination and transportation of virus to the adjacent district from the endemic ones were major issues they wanted to handle.

“It is multi-pronged strategy to entrust responsibility and vest authority in DHOs by redefining their role. The campaign will run from August 26 to 29. They have been asked to send proposals for early eradication of poliovirus in their respective areas,” said the health secretary.

Sources said that in the past few months, complaints against UN staffers were sent from Swabi, Bajaur and Bannu by district administrations but the response was lackluster.

“In the past few months, there have been complaints by commissioners and deputy commissioners against UN staff. They are unable to take action against UN staff. A mechanism of accountability, applicable to government and UN staff alike, is needed to make coordinated efforts and free the province of polio,” they said.

Malakand and Hazara divisions, which don’t have UN staff, have performed well on the polio front as opposed to southern, central and merged districts where the WHO and Unicef staff is aggressively involved in vaccination. At the same time, the administration’s role in the campaign should remain limited to management issues, while technical issues should be left to the DHOs.

About 10,000 UN-paid workers are in the province but all of them report to their respective organisations. The provincial government is waiting for suggestions, including getting control of UN agencies to re-assert the former’s role in the vaccination.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2019