Religious leaders, doctors urge polio vaccination in Pakistan drive

In the northern Pakistani district of Khar, an unusual coalition gathered on a Saturday afternoon to make a simple case: vaccinate your children against polio. The event, organized by ComNet with support from Unicef, brought together religious scholars, tribal elders, doctors, and parents in the village of Wara Mamond. The message was urgent but not new. What made this gathering noteworthy was who was delivering it—not just health officials, but Ulema and community leaders whose voices carry weight in regions where vaccine hesitancy has proven stubborn.

Polio remains a disease that leaves children permanently paralyzed. The speakers at Wara Mamond did not soften this reality. District health communication officer Rafiq Ahmad, Maulana Muradullah, Deputy Medical Superintendent Dr. Mujeebur Rahman, and EPI Director Saeed Khan each took time to describe what polio actually does to a child's body—the permanent physical disability, the lifelong consequences, the suffering that vaccination could prevent entirely. They were not speaking in abstractions. They were naming the stakes.

The timing of the event was deliberate. A nationwide anti-polio vaccination drive was set to begin on February 28, and health authorities knew that success would depend on convincing parents who had resisted vaccination in the past. In regions like Khar, where religious and tribal leadership shapes community decisions, having the Ulema stand alongside doctors sent a particular signal: this is not a foreign imposition or a medical overreach. This is protection.

The speakers made two direct requests of the assembled crowd. First, they asked parents to bring their children to vaccination centers when the drive launched. Second, they asked community members to become advocates themselves—to reach out to other parents, particularly those known to refuse vaccination, and persuade them to change their minds. The work of eradication, the message implied, would require not just medical infrastructure but community conviction.

Polio vaccination campaigns in Pakistan have faced resistance rooted in various concerns: distrust of government health systems, religious objections, misinformation about vaccine safety, and in some cases, the legacy of failed or incomplete previous campaigns. By assembling religious leaders and health officials on the same platform, authorities were attempting to address one source of hesitancy directly—the perception that vaccination conflicts with religious values or community identity. When a Maulana endorses vaccination, that distinction collapses.

The event in Khar was one moment in a much longer struggle. Pakistan remains one of only two countries in the world where polio continues to circulate. The disease has been nearly eradicated globally, but in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it persists, largely because vaccination coverage remains incomplete in certain regions. Each child left unvaccinated is a potential reservoir for the virus, a link in a chain that could spread the disease to vaccinated and unvaccinated populations alike.

What happened at Wara Mamond reflected a shift in strategy—moving beyond top-down health messaging toward community-embedded persuasion. The Ulema were not being asked to endorse something they did not believe in. Rather, they were being asked to help their communities understand what health officials already knew: that polio is preventable, that the vaccine works, and that the cost of inaction is measured in children who will never walk normally again.