by JNS
During the first days of the campaign, WHO doctors vaccinated 161,030 children under the age of 10, above the projection of 156,500.
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A health worker administers the polio vaccine to a
Palestinian child in the central Gaza Strip, Sept. 1, 2024. Photo by
Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images. |
World Health Organization doctors in the Gaza Strip have vaccinated more than 160,000 children against the polio virus this week, surpassing the projected numbers during the first days of the 10-day campaign, the WHO representative in Jerusalem told reporters on Tuesday.
“Up until now things are going well,” Dr Rik Peeperkorn said. “These humanitarian pauses, up until now they work. We still have 10 days to go.”
Israel last week agreed to temporarily halt some military operations to allow for the vaccination campaign. The decision reportedly came after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue during a meeting in Jerusalem.
The campaign is being conducted by the WHO together with UNICEF, working in coordination with the IDF’s Southern Command and its Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which stands accused of collaborating with Hamas terrorists, is also involved in the vaccine drive, Israeli media reported this week.
On Sunday and Monday, the WHO inoculated 161,030 children under the age of 10, above the projection of 156,500, Dr Peeperkorn said.
“We need to cover a minimum of 90% of those children to stop the transmission within Gaza and to avoid polio spread, international spread of polio to surrounding countries,” he stated during a briefing.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Sunday that its troops would “work to ensure that the population can safely reach the medical centers where the vaccinations will be administered.”
COGAT said it and the agencies involved in the vaccination campaign “conducted joint assessments, including the import of vaccines, medical and logistical equipment, refrigeration units for vaccine storage and transportation, the entry of polio-specialized medical teams into the Gaza Strip [and] marking vaccination areas in the operational systems.”
The Israeli government has facilitated the transfer of close to 300,000 doses of polio vaccine into Gaza since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist onslaught in the western Negev region, an IDF spokesperson said late last month.
In the upcoming weeks, another 43,250 vials of vaccine are scheduled to arrive in Israel and will be delivered to the coastal enclave, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, the military’s international spokesman, tweeted. He said the doses will be sufficient to vaccinate over a million children.
Polio is a highly infectious disease that is spread through fecal-oral contamination, sometimes by drinking water contaminated due to poor sanitation and sewage infrastructure. The virus invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis, sometimes in a matter of hours.
Two months ago, the IDF announced it was starting polio vaccinations for soldiers fighting in Gaza after the virus was found in sewage there.
In the Jewish state, some 98% of the population has received polio immunization. The virus reemerged in 2022 when a four-year-old girl from Jerusalem was diagnosed with the virus after experiencing paralysis, followed by several outbreaks of the disease across the country.
JNS
Source: https://www.jns.org/who-inoculates-160000-gaza-children-with-polio-vaccine-surpassing-targets/
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