gerian states that refused the polio vaccine, justified the decision not to vaccinate on the grounds that “it is a lesser of two evils to sacrifice two, three, four, five, even 10 children [to polio] than allow hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of girl-children likely to be rendered infertile.”
The Baltimore Sun offers the example of a young Nigerian mother who rejected polio vaccine for her child. The child did get polio, and the mother was asked if she regretted her decision. Unhesitatingly, she replied, “No, I would do the same [again].” Villagers saw the vaccination program as a threat and on occasion “chased, threatened and assaulted vaccinators. Frustrated, some vaccination teams dumped thousands of doses of the vaccine rather than face angry villagers.”
By mid-2004 the conspiracy theory had jumped to India, where a health worker noted that in one slum, “many poor and ignorant women regard the anti-polio drops as a deceptive strategy to control the birth rate.”
Such phobia about the West infecting Muslims with diseases is nothing new. In a 1997 book I surveyed some earlier accusations:
The British imported cholera and malaria to Egypt after World War II; a British midwife who trained in the Kabylia province of Algeria got accused by an angry Algerian supervisor of working in league with the “white-coated saboteurs passing their hands from vagina to vagina, infecting my heroic people with syphilis!” An unnamed enemy – presumably American – infiltrated deadly diseases into Iraq via maggot-ridden cigarettes; Israel transmitted cancer to Palestinians by getting them to take dangerous factory jobs, or subjecting them to phosphorous searches.
The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: 16 countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease – 12 in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this “a major epidemic.”
A classic conspiracy theory is Edward Hooper’s book “The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS” which suggests that AIDS originated through the use of contaminated polio vaccines in the Congo in the Fifities. Of course the whole MMR-Autism scare is another example closer to home.
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