Spanish
A police officer and a passerby died this Tuesday in an armed attack against a polio vaccination team in the northwest of Pakistan, just one day after the country launched its last national immunization campaign of 2025.
The attack occurred around 12:30 local time (07:30 GMT) in the Tangi area, located in the conflict-ridden Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. "Unknown terrorists opened fire on the polio team, killing a police officer and a pedestrian," Jafar Hussain, a police control officer in the town, told EFE by phone.
Although the healthcare workers in charge of administering the vaccines were unharmed, the attackers managed to flee after the shooting.
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The incident revives the extreme risks of the fight against the disease in Pakistan, which struggles against the resistance of armed groups and conservative sectors, who maintain that the vaccine is a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children or that it contains products derived from pork.
To protect healthcare workers, the Government has deployed some 21,000 security personnel throughout the territory, aware that these workers are a frequent target of fundamentalist groups.
The persistence of the virus, which has left about 30 cases so far this year, is considered an emergency. The Chief Minister of Sindh province, Murad Ali Shah, recently called it "shameful" that the disease is still present and warned that "there is no other way" than total vaccination to avoid the country's health isolation.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic.
