Opinion/Ahmed: Lessons to be learned about vaccine hesitancy

Sarah Ahmed is an assistant professor of health sciences and women’s and gender studies at Providence College.

Polio was eradicated in the U.S. and according to the CDC, no cases since 1979 have originated in this country. In fact, the only two countries with polio cases in the world until recently have been Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yet, in July 2022, the New York State Department of Health announced a case of polio in an adult, and news of the virus being found in wastewater samples in New York has created ripples across social media as people grapple with yet another public health concern to deal with.

While various angles can be used to understand recent events — including how it has spread, perhaps the most pertinent angle is how the U.S. public at large will react to the news of possibly adding another vaccine to their list of vaccinations. This, in a country where health care and vaccinations are increasingly political, is quite concerning. To be sure, the refusal of many Americans to the COVID-19 vaccines has been telling regarding how public health is divisive. Vaccine hesitancy, as such, must be addressed and accounted for by policymakers.

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Vaccine hesitancy is also one of the main reasons Pakistan has struggled to become polio-free. In a country where the CIA used health campaigns as a cover-up to find Osama bin Laden, many Pakistanis in remote areas are skeptical of the components of the polio vaccine, which consists of drops given orally to children under the age of 2. In my interviews, I was told by many community members living in rural areas of Pakistan’s Punjab province that the vaccine is an elaborate scheme by the West to render Muslims impotent, thereby eliminating the Muslim population in the long term. As a result, polio workers, among which women make up a significant portion, are targeted frequently for being pawns in such a "scheme." This is of course in addition to the influx of Afghan refugees into Pakistan in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

For policymakers in the U.S. and Pakistan, it is important to acknowledge and accept the sociopolitical histories that contribute to the mistrust of the public in health care. To be sure, it was not very long ago that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted, forced sterilization by the U.S. Indian Health Services on indigenous women, among many other incidents of questionable ethics.

Finally, another consideration is the blame game that further alienates already marginalized populations in the U.S.: we have already seen the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic and stigmatizing of the LGBTQIA+ community in public health messaging around monkeypox. One wonders if xenophobia of immigrants from the Global South, especially South Asians, will be next given in the wake of new polio cases. Consequently, more must be done by the administration to educate the masses against using public health concerns as a means of harassment against marginalized populations.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Ahmed: Lessons to be learned about vaccine hesitancy