Health Minister Conferred Sitara-i-Imtiaz for Turning Around Polio

Saira Afzal Tarar, Pakistan's Minister of State for National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, was conferred the Sitara-i-Imtiaz — one of Pakistan's highest civil awards — in recognition of the turnaround in the country's polio programme.

What was turned around

The numbers are unambiguous. Pakistan recorded 306 wild poliovirus cases in 2014, its worst total since 2000 and the great majority of all polio cases reported worldwide that year. Three years later the annual total was 8 — at the time the lowest in the country's history.

A reduction of roughly 97 per cent in three years, in the last major endemic country, is among the most significant public health achievements in Pakistan's history.

What produced it

The turnaround came from structural change rather than any single intervention:

• Emergency operations centres at national and provincial level, putting government and partner staff on one floor with one plan and one data set — which shortened the gap between finding a problem and acting on it.
• Access restored to North Waziristan after the vaccination ban that ran from 2012 to 2014, and mass vaccination of the displaced population that had been unreachable for two years.
• Independent monitoring. Post-campaign finger-mark checks made it far harder for a district to report coverage it had not achieved.
• Near-real-time data, allowing the programme to see which union councils were missing children while a round was still running.
• Security integrated into campaign planning rather than added afterwards.

Why recognition of political leadership is appropriate here

Polio eradication's binding constraints in Pakistan are largely political rather than technical: sustained funding, provincial accountability, access negotiation in contested districts, and keeping eradication on the national agenda through competing priorities. Delivering on those is what political leadership is for.

What followed

The record since is a caution rather than a continuation. 2018 recorded 12 cases; 2019 recorded 147 after a false rumour in Peshawar collapsed public confidence in campaigns; 2021 recorded a single case; 2024 recorded 74; 2025 recorded 31.

Gains in the last mile of eradication are not permanent. They have to be defended in the same districts every year. See the 2019 reversal.

Related

government commitment · polio cases in 2014 · polio cases in 2017