Pakistan Launches Third National Polio Vaccination Campaign of 2025

The Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme launched its third national polio vaccination campaign of 2025, continuing the intensified schedule adopted after the 2024 resurgence.

The year this campaign belonged to

2024 closed with 74 confirmed wild poliovirus cases — a twelvefold increase on 2023's six. The response through 2025 combined intensified national and sub-national rounds, expanded transit point vaccination, integrated health camps in communities with high refusal rates, and escalated access negotiation in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

2025 closed at 31 cases, less than half the previous year's total.

Why three national rounds in a year

Campaign sequencing is deliberate rather than routine. National immunisation days target every child under five — around 45 million — and are timed against the transmission season, which builds through the second half of the year. The aim is to raise population immunity before the peak rather than react to it.

Between national rounds, sub-national rounds cover districts selected by risk assessment, and case-response rounds follow any confirmed case or positive environmental sample. More recent campaign planning has increasingly been driven by environmental surveillance results, on the logic that a round delivered into a catchment where virus has just been detected achieves considerably more than the same round delivered somewhere quiet.

What a national round involves

Hundreds of thousands of frontline workers, microplans covering every union council, a cold chain that must hold in extreme heat, fixed vaccination sites, around 500 permanent transit points for travelling families, and security coordination in high-risk districts. Independent post-campaign monitoring follows, checking finger marks in sampled households.

The measure that counts

Children missed, not children reached. A round reporting high national coverage while missing children in the union councils where the virus circulates has not succeeded. In southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the dominant reason children are missed is access — campaigns cannot run at all; in urban Sindh it is repeated absence; in Balochistan it is mobility and refusal clusters.

Where it stands now

By September 2026, Pakistan had reported four wild poliovirus cases for the year, three of them from the Bannu division in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — confirming that campaign access in that corridor remains the decisive variable.

For parents

Two drops for every child under five in every round, including children vaccinated in the previous campaign. Complete the routine EPI schedule. Call 1166 if no team reaches your household.

Related: district-wise cases · eradication strategy