Why 40,000 Karachi families refused polio vaccine
Forty thousand Karachi families refused polio vaccines this year. In a city where the virus circulates in every district, these denials represent the gap between Pakistan’s impressive polio infrastructure and its inability to close the last mile of eradication. Pakistan has reduced polio cases by more than 99.6 percent since 1994—from 20,000 annual cases to just 30 this year. It has built one of the most extensive surveillance systems in the world: 127 environmental sampling sites, 12,500 reference sites and campaigns targeting 45 million children. Two of the world’s three strains of the polio virus have been eradicated. But Pakistan
