The World is insane: Five polio workers shot dead in Pakistan

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. And there were existing "this is a Western plot" rumours, as wel

Safa's right leg is paralyzed, and Tahir Wali now realizes his daughter's plight was wholly avoidable. The girl's grandmother repeatedly turned away polio vaccination teams from the family's front door, convinced that the vaccine sterilizes girls. Like many Pakistanis, she bought into rumors spun by fundamentalist imams who denounce polio vaccination campaigns as a Western plot.
...
Underlying those factors, however, is an intense mistrust among some Pakistanis for the vaccines and the people who supply and administer them. Radical clerics seed rumors that vaccines are un-Islamic because they are made from substances derived from pigs, or that they cause infertility. Some clerics try to convince parents that polio vaccines are made from the urine of Satan.

The reluctance by some Pakistanis to trust polio vaccination programs is also driven by a belief that the U.S. is behind the campaigns. Anti-American sentiments are more fervent than ever in the country, stoked this year by the case of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who shot to death two Pakistanis in Lahore in January, as well as by President Obama's decision to not inform Pakistani leaders in advance about the U.S. operation against Osama bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad in May.

Parents' fears about polio immunization drives were compounded by a CIA-orchestrated phony vaccination campaign aimed at obtaining DNA evidence from Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad in the weeks before the U.S. commando raid that killed him.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/17/world/la-fg-pakistan-polio-20111017