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It has mostly got to do with health workers who were at risk because the clerics and Taliban threatened them. They also spread the misinformation that vaccinati

It has mostly got to do with health workers who were at risk because the clerics and Taliban threatened them. They also spread the misinformation that vaccinations are a Western conspiracy against Pakistanis to sterilise and reduce the population of Muslims. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/04/polio-vaccination-pakistan http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/nov/04/... Sadly, most people in these areas are uneducated and they believe what the clerics tell them. The health workers were literally risking their lives.

ealexhudson 13y ago
It didn't help that it turned out the CIA were running "fake" vaccination campaigns to gather information though - that would have helped confirm suspicions in the eyes of anyone, not just the uneducated.
- pjg 13y ago
  That's how they got Bin Laden's hideout confirmation. By running a fake vaccination campaign to get his children inoculated and collect and match the DNA to confirm his presence. Unfortunate side-effect
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    Unfortunate side-effect May be unfortunate, but it's also highly predictable. "Solving" one problem to create a much larger (longer-lasting) one has been a cornerstone of our foreign policy.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      It's one of the parts that I kind of wish would/could have been kept under wraps. Publicizing how exactly we found the guy, no matter how exactly we did it, just doesn't seem constructive!
    - waps 13y ago
      Frankly, even if true, and they actually vaccinated the children, I'd still consider it a positive. I would also note that the taliban were against vaccination before this happened. So let's not pretend that this is the reason they're against it. It's just a reason to blame the cia. You should think of these guys as that they don't actually believe. They're not muslims. They do believe, maybe even correctly, that their power is based upon that religion. And so they wildly attack anything remotely suspected of being against it. Meanwhile they themselves rape do drugs and alcohol and worse. And they attack aid workers, since the idea that only allah can heal, that they think essential.
      - joshuapants 13y ago
        Ah, yes, the no true Muslim argument
      - sobkas 13y ago
        >Frankly, even if true, and they actually vaccinated the children, I'd still consider it a positive. To get hepatitis b immunity, You need to get two to three doses of vaccine. In this case children only got one. I don't think it was an effective immunization effort. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccination-medecins-frontieres http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccin...
        waps 13y ago
        Even one would protect you for ~10 years. It would still have a profound positive effect. And yes, there are always better options in existence, and there is always a shortage of people wanting to pay for it.
        sobkas 13y ago
        I tough that the first dose of HBV vaccine doesn't give protection to every vaccinated person, only roughly 30-50%? http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/chi31-2_vaccination-risk.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/chi31-2_vaccination-ri... (paragraph starting with "Administer the full 3-dose HBV vaccine") I'm interested where did you found an info about that 10years period of protection?
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    His assassination also had the unfortunate side effect of turning him into a martyr that has attracted a lot of people to join Al Qaeda, making it stronger than it's been in years.
    - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
      As opposed to what, putting him on "trial"?
      - Cadsby 13y ago
        Why did you put trial in quotes? (Genuinely curious) I was under the impression that that's what we did as a society with people suspected of major crimes. Even Nazi war criminals, people responsible for the suffering and death of untold millions, were put on trial.
        gumby 13y ago
        The Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials were show trials. The US wanted to have trials, the UK just string the losers up post haste and the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial, was really thrilled. There's no question some horrible people who did dreadful things were hanged as a result of those trials. But nn such a context it's impossible to not to have any decision overshadowed as "victor's justice" no matter how seemingly legitimate. And there _was_ ambiguity in some cases. Example: the victor decides that "waging war" is the crime while the general from the losing side is professionally executing his judgement in fighting a battle. Or where the losers were punished for something that the winners also did (e.g. destruction of Dresden: terrible, ineffective in pursuit of the war, and completely understandable in context). Basically trials, in this context, are solely to assuage the guilt of the victors. They are no more just than simply executing those the victors have decided are guilty. BTW there was a lot of contemporary discussion on this; this is not an ex post facto opinion.
        pmr_ 13y ago
        I think it is important to point out that no one has been declared guilty of "waging war" at the Nuremberg Trials but for waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties and conspiring for such a war. (The full quote can be found under "Nuremberg Principles".) You are certainly right that such trials always will feel wrong and I'm sure a lawyer could bring up several good arguments why they are wrong. I still think they are better than plain shooting someone because they indicate a willingness to follow higher standards than the other party. Moral high ground is important in conflicts motivated by ideology. On a tangent I also feel that the lack of moral high ground is why approval of U.S. foreign policy is declining among its allies and even more so among neutral countries.
  - aestra 13y ago
    Excuse me? Do you know how close we are to eradicating polio? Eradication. Nobody will ever die or suffer from polio again, forever. This will save millions of lives over the years, more people than Bin Laden could ever kill. We are so close to this goal, and to put it in danger just because we have a grudge against someone is beyond irresponsible. http://www.polioeradication.org http://www.polioeradication.org 372 cases last year.
    - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
      A grudge? You're thinking is just as sick and twisted as aTEmpOral's.
      - TeMPOraL 13y ago
        Yes. A grudge. Eradicating polio is in a completely different league than Osama and what he did. The whole WTC-terrorist subplot is an irrelevant non-issue compared with polio program. Also, the world is not contained within US borders.
      - aestra 13y ago
        Let me put it this way: It is NEVER worth putting at risk even one GLOBAL humanitarian campaign that has been going on since 1988 and is so far 99.9% effective, has cost billions of dollars, has saved thousands, if not millions of lives, and is very close to meeting its goals. If it meets its goals, then there is no more suffering or death from polio forever, just to get one person. Even if this person was a murderous thug. There was a time where polio was feared in the United States, there was a time were Americans suffered, children died. People lived in iron lungs, and we had a President with polio paralysis. (Franklin D. Roosevelt) Vaccination was so important that the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." This lead to the development of the vaccine(s). We are removed from it, so now we don't seem to care about the others who aren't. There hasn't been polio in the North American continent since 1994. The United States was so focused on Bin Ladin and catching him that they were willing to do whatever it took without thinking about the consequences of their actions. They had serious blinders on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1954/ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/19...
  - rdtsc 13y ago
    All good except you have it the other way. Killing OBL was an unfortunate side-effect of setting back eradication of deadly diseases by many decades.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Messing up with the biosafety of the planet just to catch a political enemy. How awesome.
  - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
    Of course the CIA doing its job to track down a murderous thug is somehow "messing with the biosafety" of the planet. Not only that, but according to the sick and twisted thinking of TeMPOral, Bin Laden is a "political enemy". Sure, Bin Laden is just a politician with legitimate differences. This kind of twisted thinking by TempOral and way too many others like him is what is wrong with the world these days. You should be ashamed of yourself.
    - hingisundhorsa 13y ago
      We're all so easily swayed by propaganda to label someone "murderous thug". Odd how we never had a trial, never had concrete verifiable data and easily label them as such. We sweep those collateral casualties under the rug the same way the "barbaric" people we purport to be attempting to "civilize" do. I worry about us and our future.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      "Political enemy" != "politician with legitimate differences in ideas"; "Political enemy" == "an enemy of the state because of (state's) politics". I was purposefully exaggerating for effect with "biosafety of the planet" but only so much; because polio is a bitch. It is a nasty group of viruses that take a huge coordinated global effort to keep in check, and the moment you stop being careful, it'll spread around faster than you can say "sick stewardess on an international airport visiting friends". Therefore, in my opinion messing with social acceptance of polio vaccination program might have a second-order effect of bringing polio back to the places it was already eradicated from.
    - brazzy 13y ago
      Sorry, but it is your thinking that is twistend and what is wrong with the world these days, and it is you who should be ashamed of it.
- gadders 13y ago
  Not sure that it was a predictable outcome that the Taliban would decide to start acting against their own interests and kill anyone involved in any vaccination problems.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  'Fake' - how? Not real vaccine? Citation
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > It didn't help that it turned out the CIA were running "fake" vaccination campaigns to gather information though Did they at least actually vaccinate people? I mean you can run a vaccination campaign as a front, which is already a pretty terrible thing to do (for reasons that vaccinations HAVE to be out of public suspicion), but the times when you have to play the part, at least have the decency to deliver actual vaccines. Got some sources for this story? Risking anti-polio vaccination programs of large populations really doesn't seem like a fair trade-off for capturing a single person (or anything, really), even if they're the founder of Al-Qaeda. Now some of those health workers are dead, a bunch of people are going to be crippled, distrust against vaccination has grown in those areas, a large-scale humanitarian project has been sabotaged, but hey at least they got Bin Laden.
_mgr 13y ago
Educated people it seems are just as likely to believe the ramblings of religious idiots.
tod222 13y ago
middleclick, perhaps you should read this Scientific American article: How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All The U.S. was wrong to use health workers to target Osama bin Laden http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-cia-fak...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- danielharan 13y ago
  This is shocking, and after reading it I'm angry. Better to know it than not though, so thank you for sharing.

ealexhudson 13y ago

It didn't help that it turned out the CIA were running "fake" vaccination campaigns to gather information though - that would have helped confirm suspicions in the eyes of anyone, not just the uneducated.

pjg 13y ago
That's how they got Bin Laden's hideout confirmation. By running a fake vaccination campaign to get his children inoculated and collect and match the DNA to confirm his presence. Unfortunate side-effect
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Unfortunate side-effect May be unfortunate, but it's also highly predictable. "Solving" one problem to create a much larger (longer-lasting) one has been a cornerstone of our foreign policy.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    It's one of the parts that I kind of wish would/could have been kept under wraps. Publicizing how exactly we found the guy, no matter how exactly we did it, just doesn't seem constructive!
  - waps 13y ago
    Frankly, even if true, and they actually vaccinated the children, I'd still consider it a positive. I would also note that the taliban were against vaccination before this happened. So let's not pretend that this is the reason they're against it. It's just a reason to blame the cia. You should think of these guys as that they don't actually believe. They're not muslims. They do believe, maybe even correctly, that their power is based upon that religion. And so they wildly attack anything remotely suspected of being against it. Meanwhile they themselves rape do drugs and alcohol and worse. And they attack aid workers, since the idea that only allah can heal, that they think essential.
    - joshuapants 13y ago
      Ah, yes, the no true Muslim argument
    - sobkas 13y ago
      >Frankly, even if true, and they actually vaccinated the children, I'd still consider it a positive. To get hepatitis b immunity, You need to get two to three doses of vaccine. In this case children only got one. I don't think it was an effective immunization effort. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccination-medecins-frontieres http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/14/cia-fake-vaccin...
      - waps 13y ago
        Even one would protect you for ~10 years. It would still have a profound positive effect. And yes, there are always better options in existence, and there is always a shortage of people wanting to pay for it.
        sobkas 13y ago
        I tough that the first dose of HBV vaccine doesn't give protection to every vaccinated person, only roughly 30-50%? http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/chi31-2_vaccination-risk.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/data/chi31-2_vaccination-ri... (paragraph starting with "Administer the full 3-dose HBV vaccine") I'm interested where did you found an info about that 10years period of protection?
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  His assassination also had the unfortunate side effect of turning him into a martyr that has attracted a lot of people to join Al Qaeda, making it stronger than it's been in years.
  - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
    As opposed to what, putting him on "trial"?
    - Cadsby 13y ago
      Why did you put trial in quotes? (Genuinely curious) I was under the impression that that's what we did as a society with people suspected of major crimes. Even Nazi war criminals, people responsible for the suffering and death of untold millions, were put on trial.
      - gumby 13y ago
        The Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials were show trials. The US wanted to have trials, the UK just string the losers up post haste and the Soviet Union, the home of the show trial, was really thrilled. There's no question some horrible people who did dreadful things were hanged as a result of those trials. But nn such a context it's impossible to not to have any decision overshadowed as "victor's justice" no matter how seemingly legitimate. And there _was_ ambiguity in some cases. Example: the victor decides that "waging war" is the crime while the general from the losing side is professionally executing his judgement in fighting a battle. Or where the losers were punished for something that the winners also did (e.g. destruction of Dresden: terrible, ineffective in pursuit of the war, and completely understandable in context). Basically trials, in this context, are solely to assuage the guilt of the victors. They are no more just than simply executing those the victors have decided are guilty. BTW there was a lot of contemporary discussion on this; this is not an ex post facto opinion.
        pmr_ 13y ago
        I think it is important to point out that no one has been declared guilty of "waging war" at the Nuremberg Trials but for waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties and conspiring for such a war. (The full quote can be found under "Nuremberg Principles".) You are certainly right that such trials always will feel wrong and I'm sure a lawyer could bring up several good arguments why they are wrong. I still think they are better than plain shooting someone because they indicate a willingness to follow higher standards than the other party. Moral high ground is important in conflicts motivated by ideology. On a tangent I also feel that the lack of moral high ground is why approval of U.S. foreign policy is declining among its allies and even more so among neutral countries.
- aestra 13y ago
  Excuse me? Do you know how close we are to eradicating polio? Eradication. Nobody will ever die or suffer from polio again, forever. This will save millions of lives over the years, more people than Bin Laden could ever kill. We are so close to this goal, and to put it in danger just because we have a grudge against someone is beyond irresponsible. http://www.polioeradication.org http://www.polioeradication.org 372 cases last year.
  - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
    A grudge? You're thinking is just as sick and twisted as aTEmpOral's.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Yes. A grudge. Eradicating polio is in a completely different league than Osama and what he did. The whole WTC-terrorist subplot is an irrelevant non-issue compared with polio program. Also, the world is not contained within US borders.
    - aestra 13y ago
      Let me put it this way: It is NEVER worth putting at risk even one GLOBAL humanitarian campaign that has been going on since 1988 and is so far 99.9% effective, has cost billions of dollars, has saved thousands, if not millions of lives, and is very close to meeting its goals. If it meets its goals, then there is no more suffering or death from polio forever, just to get one person. Even if this person was a murderous thug. There was a time where polio was feared in the United States, there was a time were Americans suffered, children died. People lived in iron lungs, and we had a President with polio paralysis. (Franklin D. Roosevelt) Vaccination was so important that the The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." This lead to the development of the vaccine(s). We are removed from it, so now we don't seem to care about the others who aren't. There hasn't been polio in the North American continent since 1994. The United States was so focused on Bin Ladin and catching him that they were willing to do whatever it took without thinking about the consequences of their actions. They had serious blinders on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_eradication http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1954/ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/19...
- rdtsc 13y ago
  All good except you have it the other way. Killing OBL was an unfortunate side-effect of setting back eradication of deadly diseases by many decades.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Messing up with the biosafety of the planet just to catch a political enemy. How awesome.
- mortyseinfeld 13y ago
  Of course the CIA doing its job to track down a murderous thug is somehow "messing with the biosafety" of the planet. Not only that, but according to the sick and twisted thinking of TeMPOral, Bin Laden is a "political enemy". Sure, Bin Laden is just a politician with legitimate differences. This kind of twisted thinking by TempOral and way too many others like him is what is wrong with the world these days. You should be ashamed of yourself.
  - hingisundhorsa 13y ago
    We're all so easily swayed by propaganda to label someone "murderous thug". Odd how we never had a trial, never had concrete verifiable data and easily label them as such. We sweep those collateral casualties under the rug the same way the "barbaric" people we purport to be attempting to "civilize" do. I worry about us and our future.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    "Political enemy" != "politician with legitimate differences in ideas"; "Political enemy" == "an enemy of the state because of (state's) politics". I was purposefully exaggerating for effect with "biosafety of the planet" but only so much; because polio is a bitch. It is a nasty group of viruses that take a huge coordinated global effort to keep in check, and the moment you stop being careful, it'll spread around faster than you can say "sick stewardess on an international airport visiting friends". Therefore, in my opinion messing with social acceptance of polio vaccination program might have a second-order effect of bringing polio back to the places it was already eradicated from.
  - brazzy 13y ago
    Sorry, but it is your thinking that is twistend and what is wrong with the world these days, and it is you who should be ashamed of it.
gadders 13y ago
Not sure that it was a predictable outcome that the Taliban would decide to start acting against their own interests and kill anyone involved in any vaccination problems.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
'Fake' - how? Not real vaccine? Citation
tripzilch 13y ago
> It didn't help that it turned out the CIA were running "fake" vaccination campaigns to gather information though Did they at least actually vaccinate people? I mean you can run a vaccination campaign as a front, which is already a pretty terrible thing to do (for reasons that vaccinations HAVE to be out of public suspicion), but the times when you have to play the part, at least have the decency to deliver actual vaccines. Got some sources for this story? Risking anti-polio vaccination programs of large populations really doesn't seem like a fair trade-off for capturing a single person (or anything, really), even if they're the founder of Al-Qaeda. Now some of those health workers are dead, a bunch of people are going to be crippled, distrust against vaccination has grown in those areas, a large-scale humanitarian project has been sabotaged, but hey at least they got Bin Laden.

_mgr 13y ago

Educated people it seems are just as likely to believe the ramblings of religious idiots.

tod222 13y ago

middleclick, perhaps you should read this Scientific American article: How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All The U.S. was wrong to use health workers to target Osama bin Laden http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaign-endangers-us-all http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-cia-fak...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
danielharan 13y ago
This is shocking, and after reading it I'm angry. Better to know it than not though, so thank you for sharing.