There are two broad reasons for Pakistan being one of the only two countries in the world with active polio cases; the other country is Afghanistan. The first is that government after government has simply failed to offer a credible alternative to the extremist narrative doing the rounds in the periphery; that polio drops are an enemy conspiracy, mixed with substances that make it against our religion to give it to our children, or that it is yet another of the enemy’s ploys to make our next generations infertile. Other countries, especially in Africa where literacy rates tend to be very low, have also encountered such problems, yet Pakistan has the dubious honour of never being able to do anything about them. The second is that terrorists are able to exploit these soft targets to destabilise the state. And yet again, as authorities rolled out the anti-polio vaccination drive after the lull caused by the pandemic, a police officer was shot dead by unknown people in Kohat city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And as a similar drive restarts in Balochistan, people there are bracing for similar violence as well. And so we go round in circles and remain in the clutches of a virus that destroys many lives in each generation in this country. Afghanistan’s problem is still understandable. It has been at constant war for four decades and has not seen any sort of development in that time. It’s no surprise that it just does not have the resources to conduct a vaccination drive across the country. But there’s nothing to justify the fact that we are still on that list. Pakistan has achieved excellence in many fields. Even during the Covid-19 pandemic that paralysed the whole world, Pakistan was able to contain the virus and keep the economy going better than most of the world. Therefore, it just beggars belief that it is unable to get a handle on the polio problem. Most children born in this country are already at a disadvantage as they fight malnourishment and stunting at very young ages. For them to face the threat of polio as well, when the whole world left it behind a long time ago, is simply unacceptable. It is, at the end of the day, the job of the government to take care of such things; and that is precisely what is expected of it. *