Just whose fault is it that as many as 142,962 children were missed during the recent anti-polio drive in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) alone? And who should be held responsible for the near 50,000 parents that simply refused the vaccinations for one reason or another? It is, at the end of the day, the duty of the government to run the country effectively and make sure that lives and properties of all the citizens are safe at all times. Then why is it that Pakistan must always be one of the few countries, sometimes the only country, to continue to struggle against the polio virus while all others have been successful? Clearly the government has failed in its primary mission to educate people properly about the necessity of polio drops for their children and just what is at stake if baseless rumours dominate their thinking. Observes speak of loopholes in the official campaign, lack of proper training, false rumours about the vaccine including one that children grow up to be impotent because of it, etc, as some of the main problems. There is also the popular assertion that said vaccine has nothing to do with polio but rather it is a tool of the enemies of our religion to harm the many Muslims of the country. That the government has been helpless to counter such nonsensical claims and also been unable to win the crucial war against polio speaks volumes about the ineffectiveness of its approach. And the timing could not have been worse. Anti-polio operations had to be suspended for months due to the coronavirus pandemic but once they resumed there was the feeling that the fight against this deadly disease might finally be over soon. Sadly the truth that is emerging is rather different. The government will have to get its act together for the sake of the children and the country’s future. It also cannot go about with the stained reputation of having failed against polio, something that the entire world has overcome. The government must now move beyond its successes in controlling the spread of the coronavirus and do something about polio, which has a vaccine and every country in the world has used it successfully. *