Israel facilitates massive polio vaccination drive in Gaza
A three-phase medical campaign headed by the United Nations is underway after several children in the Strip contracted the disease.
Amid a polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip, the World Health Organization is spearheading a massive vaccination campaign for more than 600,000 children there, with help from Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
The outbreak, which has affected a handful of Gazan children this summer, is at risk of being exacerbated by conditions in the Strip amid the Israel-Hamas war, which has hundreds of thousands of displaced persons huddled in camps and tent cities.
The Israel Defense Forces is also vaccinating its own troops in Gaza as it adapts the fighting to facilitate the medical campaign.
The Israeli government and army are helping the vaccination drive “promptly, comprehensively and effectively,” Professor Dorit Nitzan, a former WHO official and current director of the master’s program in emergency medicine at Ben Gurion University, told JNS.
The IDF has paused fighting in certain areas to facilitate the first phase of vaccinations. Israel has allowed international medical teams to enter Gaza to train locals and ensured that they enjoy freedom of movement, said Nitzan, one of the government’s advisers on the Gaza outbreak
The first phase is focused on children under 10 in central Gaza, and is to be followed by a second phase in the south with 340,000 children and a third and final phase in the north, which is scheduled to be completed on Sept. 11, the WHO said on Wednesday. The WHO, an agency of the United Nations, has dozens of teams administering the vaccines in the Gaza Strip or training locals on how to do so.
“At least 90% vaccination coverage during each round of the campaign is needed to stop the outbreak, prevent the international spread of polio, and reduce the risk of its re-emergence, given the severely disrupted health, water, and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip,” the WHO said.
The 1.2 million doses of orally administered vaccines that the WHO has shipped to Gaza with Israel’s approval account for about $200,000 of the operation’s total budget of several million dollars, a WHO official told JNS. WHO is covering all or almost all of the costs, the official said, adding that each vaccinated child gets two doses.
The outbreak originated in a vaccine featuring a weakened virus, Nitzan confirmed to JNS. It has mutated to cause infections, subsequently spreading through the population.
“We know it’s vaccine-derived because it’s a type 2 virus, whose wild form has been eradicated,” she said. The virus spreads mainly through contaminated water.
Although only several cases of polio have been diagnosed in Gaza so far, the disease has likely spread far wider, according to Nitzan. “For every child we know who has polio, there are probably a hundred more who carry the virus,” she said.
Israeli troops who return regularly from Gaza will likely not contract the virus, Nitzan said, because most have been vaccinated. But the army is vaccinating again anyway “to be extra safe and eliminate all risks,” she continued, noting that Israel has immigrants from dozens of countries with various vaccination policies, making it statistically likelier that an unvaccinated soldier would contract the virus and bring it back to Israel.
Even an unvaccinated adult would likely not get sick from the polio virus if they contract it. However, such individuals can pass the virus in feces or droplets from sneezing or coughing. The virus enters the body via the mouth. Children are far more susceptible, especially when they are younger than 18 months.
A vaccinated adult will rarely infect others with polio because the virus cannot survive in their body. But the virus still might come into Israel on the clothes, shoes, or gear of troops returning from Gaza, where many of them garrison in residential homes and search for underground tunnels—including ones partially flooded with standing water, where the polio virus tends to flourish.
Still, Nitzan said, there is no need to vaccinate Israeli children, who are nearly all vaccinated, again in connection with the outbreak.
The development underscores some of the complications that come with protracted warfare, which Israel has not endured since its Independence War of 1947-1949. Global action on the outbreak and media coverage of it, meanwhile, highlight and reinforce the international community’s shifting attention away from Israeli victims and hostages in favor of the suffering Palestinian population, for which Israel is widely blamed, being frequently accused of perpetrating a “genocide” in Gaza.
Ben Cohen, a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in a column for JNS that, given the vaccination campaign, “Israel is either waging the strangest genocide in the ghastly history of that phenomenon or isn’t waging one at all.”
The global pro-Hamas circles, he wrote, have “either been silent on the vaccine campaign or promoted ridiculous conspiracy theories accusing Israel of planting the virus and then rolling out a fake vaccine.”
https://www.jns.org/israel-facilitates-massive-polio-vaccination-drive-in-gaza/?