Gunmen Kill 2 Policemen Guarding Polio Vaccination Teams in Pakistan Over Fears Vaccines Sterilize Children

Gunmen in Pakistan killed two police officers who were protecting vaccination teams distributing oral polio vaccines (OPV) to children, reportedly over beliefs that the vaccines are a Western scheme to sterilize Muslims.

The separate killings being blamed on Taliban militants unfolded in the Bajaur district in Northwestern Pakistan on Monday, as healthcare workers conduct a door-to-door mass vaccination campaign administering the OPV to 19 million children nationwide.

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In recent decades, vaccination teams and their police bodyguards have become major targets for Taliban militant groups that believe the vaccine campaigns are either un-Islamic, cover for foreign espionage operations, or a malicious Western plot to sterilize children and reduce the Muslim population.

One radical Pakistani cleric in 2006, Maulana Fazlullah, who instructed his followers to abstain from various forms of entertainment and advocated for women not to be educated, claimed the polio vaccination programs were a “conspiracy of Jews and Christians to make Muslims impotent and stunt the growth of Muslims,” according to the CTC Sentinel.

Researchers writing in the medical journal Cureus, while studying the Pakistani anti-vax campaign, wrote:

This theory claims that vaccination programs seeking to eradicate polio within Pakistan are a scheme created by the United States and Israel to sterilize the Muslim population. The origin of this conspiracy theory has been traced to the 1988 World Health Organization campaign, “Kick Polio Out of Africa.” This was a major effort put forth with the goal of eradicating polio from Africa by the year 2000.

Pakistani militants grew extra suspicious of the campaigns in 2011 after the CIA recruited an operative to run a fake vaccination drive in order to gather intelligence on Osama Bin Ladin’s compound in Abbottabad, with Pakistan later prosecuting and imprisoning the Pakistani doctor who collaborated with the US. 

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In 2012, militants ordered bans on vaccine campaigns and polio drops for political reasons, in response to drone bombing campaigns by the US in the Waziristan region of northwest Pakistan, with pamphlets distributed to citizens reading, “till such time the continuous attack of the drones is not stopped in Waziristan, the restriction on polio drops will remain imposed…Because [we] have nothing to gain from the sympathy of such well wishers (the Americans) who spent billions of rupees on polio drops for eradicating a disease that affects one or two in a million people.” 

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While the Taliban carries on its violent opposition to vaccination campaigns based on suspicions, the OPV actually has documented links to vaccine-derived polio outbreaks, in effect contributing to the very disease it was designed to prevent.

Various studies have noted correlations between intensive OPV campaigns in India in connection with unexpected spikes of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis cases, even as wild polio cases declined.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization in February just approved a new OPV for deployment in countries still experiencing polio outbreaks.

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“Vaccines are also bringing us closer to the eradication of polio, with 41 cases of wild polio reported last year from just 24 districts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, down from 99 cases in 49 districts in 2024,” WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced at the group’s annual meeting earlier this year.

“In addition, Madagascar stopped its polio outbreak, and countries around Lake Chad mounted a joint vaccination campaign that reached more than 83 million children,” he said, adding, “And with partners WHO vaccinated over 600 000 children in Gaza, controlling the Strip’s first recorded polio outbreak in 25 years.”

He also acknowledged that, “In 2025, WHO verified 1350 attacks on health care in 19 countries and territories, causing 1981 deaths and 1168 injuries among health workers and patients.”

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