Over 40 Million Children Will Be Vaccinated During Nationwide Campaign

More than 40 million children under five were targeted in a nationwide polio vaccination campaign across Pakistan.

The question parents ask most

Why does the team come back again, when my child had the drops last month?

The answer has three parts, and it is worth stating clearly because it is the single most common source of campaign fatigue.

• Each dose gives partial protection. Immunity to oral polio vaccine builds over several doses. A child who has had drops five times is meaningfully better protected than one who has had them twice.
• Local conditions reduce how well it takes. In areas with heavy diarrhoeal disease and poor sanitation, gut infections interfere with the vaccine, so more doses are needed to reach the same protection than in low-transmission settings.
• New children keep arriving. Every round reaches infants born since the last one, and children who were away when teams last called.

The team is not repeating itself unnecessarily. See the polio FAQs.

What the round involves

Hundreds of thousands of frontline workers, microplans covering every union council, a cold chain that must hold in extreme heat, fixed 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.

What the programme actually watches

Children missed — how many, in which union councils, and why. The reasons differ by place: in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa it is access, where campaigns cannot run at all; in dense urban areas it is repeated absence; in Balochistan it is population mobility and clustered refusals.

Each of those requires a different fix, which is why disaggregating the missed-children number matters more than the headline coverage figure.

The stakes

Almost every child paralysed by polio in Pakistan was unvaccinated or under-vaccinated. Polio paralysis is permanent and has no treatment. A round accepted is protection; a round skipped cannot be recovered later.

For parents

Two drops for every child under five, every round, every time. Complete the routine EPI schedule, which is what provides lasting protection. Call 1166 if a team does not reach your household.

Related: fourth national campaign · vaccine safety