Pakistanis Do Not Trust US Vaccines Due To The CIA

 

PAKISTAN

Vaccination Games

Around the world, covid-skepticism has become a thing – leading to millions saying they will shun the vaccine.

In Pakistan that stance has a special twist.

Many Pakistanis are skeptical of vaccinations because of a fake inoculation program that the CIA used to collect DNA evidence to find al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden, whom American forces eventually tracked down in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. As Vox wrote, local leaders, including Pakistani Taliban militants, banned vaccinations in their regions.

In 2014, the White House announced that the CIA would not use a vaccination program again, wrote the Lancet, a top British medical journal.

Today, however, the skepticism lingers, creating challenges for Pakistani leaders looking to protect the world’s fifth-most populous country from COVID-19. They are under intense pressure because, while the pandemic has not hit Pakistan as hard as other countries, its health care system is still overloaded.

“We are full, we have patients waiting, we have families who are suffering, we have patients at home, sick patients at home, patients who are on oxygen, we just don’t have space in hospitals,” Dr. Nashwa Ahmad told CNN.

Pakistani leaders want to vaccinate more than 70 percent of their 220 million citizens against COVID-19 for free in the coming months. But almost half of Pakistanis don’t want to receive a coronavirus vaccine, a Gallup Poll found.

Many Pakistanis are also reluctant to take Western-made vaccinations. Along with the fear of CIA plots are other conspiracy theories that suggest vaccines were designed to sterilize Muslims or that Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is using COVID-19 to insert “chips” into people.

Some don’t want anyone to receive any other vaccines either. A gunman shot and killed a police officer escorting polio vaccinators in northern Pakistan last month, for example, reported Dawn, a Pakistani English-language news outlet.

Elites who want to receive vaccines, meanwhile, have the resources to skip lines and obtain them before everyone else, National Public Radio noted.

The country is importing vaccines from China as well as the British–Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to meet its demand, Reuters wrote. Its regulators plan to approve the Russian vaccine soon, Bloomberg added. It’s not yet clear if Pakistan will order vaccines from India, a regional rival that produces 60 percent of the world’s vaccine supply, the BBC reported.

Still, thousands of Pakistanis have volunteered to participate in vaccine trials that are preceding a vaccine rollout slated for March. “I was aware of people talking about conspiracies, about some chip being inserted into the body, about birth control,” an unnamed Pakistani told the Washington Post. “Some in my family told me not to do it, but I didn’t care.”

His courage might save the lives of others someday.