Interesting there was a fake vaccination campaign conducted by our security forces in those countries.
https://www.vox.com/first-person/22256595/vaccine-covid-paki...
Which has likely undermined peoples confidence in vaccines from those communities.
A doctor worked with American intelligence agencies to find the most wanted terrorist in the world. He is then imprisoned in Pakistan on made up charges, and is still in prison. Does the media sympathize with his plight. No. There is barely any coverage of this after 2012. Instead, the media is so concerned with low vaccination rates.
Is there a reason that media seems so biased to ignore a person's plight? A person who should be celebrated like a hero, not blamed like this.
In this fake vaccination program, we endangered health of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world in order to catch someone who had pretty well fallen off the map and wasn't an active threat to anyone for...political points?
I have nothing to back this assertion up, but I bet the number of deaths caused by vaccine hesitancy in that part of the world due to this incident is going to dwarf the number who died in 9/11 all said and done. Was that worth it?
“To achieve herd immunity, 60% of the population must be vaccinated”
Next interview, 65%. Next interview, 70%. Then 75%
While knowing the entire time that herd immunity is impossible with a leaky vaccine.
EDIT - definitly worth a read and the aspect worth a quote "However, there still exists a version of the illness known as vaccine-derived polio, which occurs in rare incidents when the weakened virus in the vaccine mutates." Which is the instance at play here in the London sewage monitoring.
I dug in and was surprised to see that the reporting does not substantiate the narrative. Read the links in that Vox article: you'll see that the story exhibits all the hallmarks of a government-sponsored disinformation campaign. The only sources in the primary reporting (the Guardian article) are from the ISI - Pakistani intelligence. [1]
The New York Times' articles hint at an alternative story, which is that the ISI needed to produce something to dampen public anger over the raid that led to Osama Bin Laden's death [2]. (That's my own crude, reductive version - it's surely more complicated than that, given the uncomfortable relationship between aid agencies and the Pakistani government):
> Dr. Afridi has told interrogators for the top Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI, that he was introduced to the C.I.A. through Save the Children, according to Pakistani officials and Western aid workers. Save the Children vigorously denies the claim, saying it has been made a scapegoat by a desperate man who, according to senior American officials, has been tortured in Pakistani custody.
Further along in the same article, we're given more reason not to take this story at face value:
> Dr. Afridi had a reputation for hustling as well as healing, and he faced multiple allegations of corruption and professional malpractice, according to officials, colleagues and government papers seen by The New York Times.
> At his private practice, several patients claimed he performed improper operations to make extra money, prompting a local warlord named Mangal Bagh to detain him for a week in 2008 until he paid a fine of $11,100
Again, it's certainly possible that the gist of the story is correct, but from the publicly available reporting on it, we only have the word of the CIA's counterpart.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/world/asia/bin-laden-raid...