Polio drive under fire in Pakistan
Vaccinators and their guards are killed as the country races to protect children
By Nasir Aijaz
The AsiaN Representative
ISLAMABAD: As Pakistan launched its latest nationwide anti-polio campaign, gunmen struck again, killing members of the teams meant to protect the country’s children, and exposing how deep the distrust, political violence and operational fragility around vaccination work remain. During the current drive this month, at least three security personnel assigned to polio teams have been shot dead in separate incidents, and vaccinators continue to face threats while administering drops door-to-door.
The attacks come at a precarious moment. Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where wild poliovirus transmission has never been interrupted — a stubborn status that keeps global eradication efforts on edge. Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in virus detections in recent years, prompting larger and more frequent campaigns.
As of late October 2025, Pakistan has reported a total of 29 wild polio cases. These cases are spread across several provinces, with 18 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, nine in Sindh, and one each in Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan. The country reported a large number of positive environmental (sewage) samples.
In Sindh province, a densely populated region that had been relatively low-risk for several years, officials say the cases are clustered among communities who recently arrived from other regions, underlining how population movement spreads risk even into areas with stronger health infrastructure.
The motives behind attacks are complex and overlapping. These factors include:
Misinformation and conspiracy: Persistent rumours that vaccination is a Western plot to sterilize children, or contains forbidden substances, continue to circulate, especially in areas with low literacy and weak public services. Those rumours were dramatically reinforced by the 2011 CIA fake-vaccination operation that was used to locate Osama bin Laden; its echo is still cited as a reason for distrust. (Prior to the 2011 assault in which bin Laden was killed, the CIA used a local doctor to fake a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Pakistan to acquire DNA samples from family members).
Militant opposition: Armed groups in some border and conflict-affected districts view vaccination teams (and the security escort that often accompanies them) as symbols of outside influence or state power, and have repeatedly targeted teams or their guards. Several attacks in recent years have been claimed, or attributed, to militants.
Religious and cultural pushback: Local clerics or conservative communities oppose door-to-door vaccination, sometimes objecting to women workers visiting households, and in some pockets have declared the program unacceptable on religious grounds.
Operational exposure: Mass door-to-door campaigns require thousands of teams operating in insecure, remote or densely urban slum environments. That operational footprint both increases opportunity for violent attack and makes teams visible targets, especially when security forces are present. Currently, over 350,000 health workers are engaged in Pakistan’s polio eradication drive, supported by an unspecified number of security personnel to ensure their safety and access during campaigns. The number of health workers can fluctuate based on the specific campaign.
As regards fatalities, accurate counts are difficult to obtain because the incidents are reported by a mixture of government units, media outlets and NGOs, however, a rough estimate, reported by certain websites, suggests that more than 200 polio team workers have lost their lives while working on polio campaigns, including female workers, male workers, police, and other security personnel since 1990s.
Academic and media surveys have documented dozens of deaths in specific provinces. For example, a 2023 review noted roughly 70 polio-worker deaths in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2012. More recent monitoring also records multiple deaths in 2022–2025 and a spate of fatal attacks during 2024–2025. Because no single authoritative year-by-year public tally exists, official counts for “the last decade” vary by source and by whether security escorts are included. The latest attack and killing was reported on October 16, 2025 from Balochistan province, where the gunmen opened fires on a polio eradication team, killing a guard. An attacker was also killed when the security personnel retaliated.
Pakistan’s authorities and international partners continue to call frontline workers “heroes” and plead for public cooperation.
