Vaccine Heroes Protect Every Child

The phrase "vaccine heroes" is used often enough to lose its meaning. It is worth restating what it describes: several hundred thousand Pakistanis who, several times a year, walk into every settlement in the country carrying two drops for every child under five.

The scale

A national immunisation round targets around 45 million children within a few days. There is no way to do that except by putting an enormous number of people on the ground simultaneously — in Karachi's dense neighbourhoods, on mountain paths in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, across sparsely settled districts in Balochistan, and at around 500 permanent transit points where families are in motion.

What the work costs

Frontline workers are paid modestly, work in extreme heat and difficult terrain, and in some districts face real physical danger — vaccinators and the police protecting them have been killed doing this job.

There is also an emotional cost that gets less attention: meeting a child paralysed because a household refused; being turned away repeatedly by the same family; and knowing that a union council which could not be entered this round will produce cases later.

Why the female workforce is central

A large proportion of vaccinators and social mobilisers are women, because in many households only a woman can enter and speak to the mother — the person who usually decides. The programme could not function without them, and their participation often requires negotiating their own family's and community's expectations before they negotiate anyone else's.

What they have delivered

Roughly 20,000 cases a year in the early 1990s. Eight cases in 2017. Thirty-one in 2025. Four by September 2026. A reduction of close to 99.8 per cent since 1994, achieved not through a single breakthrough but through repetition — the same streets, the same doors, round after round, for three decades.

Wild poliovirus types 2 and 3 no longer exist anywhere on earth. Type 1 survives in two countries, and the people described here are the reason it is not more.

How families can honour it

Open the door. Two drops for every child under five, every round, every time — including children vaccinated last month. Complete the routine immunisation schedule. And if a team never reaches your household, call 1166 so someone comes.

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