ISLAMABAD (AP) – Pakistan on Monday began its last nationwide vaccination campaign of the year to protect 45 million children from polio after a surge in new cases hampered efforts to stop the disease, officials said.

According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries there potentially deadly, crippling virus has not been stopped,

Pakistan has reported 63 confirmed cases since January.

Ayesha Raza Farooq, Adviser to the Prime Minister on the Polio Eradication Programme, said the polio drive will continue till December 22.

“As a mother, I am pleading with you to open your doors to health professionals,” she said.

A health worker administers a polio vaccine to a child at a health center in Peshawar, Pakistan, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Muhammad Sajjad

Pakistan regularly launches such campaigns despite violence that affects medical staff overseeing the vaccinations and security forces escorting them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.

Authorities deployed thousands of police to protect health workers after intelligence reports that insurgents might target them. But gunmen opened fire on Monday at police escorting polio workers in Karak, a town in restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing one policeman and wounding a health worker, local police official Ayaz Khan said.

Also on Monday, a gunman riding a motorcycle shot and wounded a police officer assigned to escort polio workers from a health facility in the northwestern city of Bannu, local police chief Hamid Khan said.

No one has claimed responsibility for the twin attacks. But more than 200 polio workers and police officers assigned to protect them have been killed since the 1990s, according to health officials and authorities.

The latest anti-polio campaign began a day after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met medical personnel and vowed that Pakistan would win the war against polio.

Afghanistan reported at least 23 confirmed cases in 2024, according to data from the World Health Organization.

In September, the Afghan Taliban suddenly stopped a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Afghanistan, a devastating setback for polio eradication because the virus is one of the world’s most contagious and any unvaccinated groups of children where the virus spreads could undo years of progress.

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Associated Press writer Riaz Khan contributed to this story from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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