The charade about polio eradication

In 2012, Neetu Vashisht and Jacob Puliye published a paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics titled Polio programme: let us declare victory and move on. Throughout their paper, they make it abundantly clear that polio is here to stay and that cases of vaccine-induced polio are reaching an all-time high. They wrote:

“It was hoped that following polio eradication, immunisation could be stopped. However the synthesis of polio virus in 2002, made eradication impossible. It is argued that getting poor countries to expend their scarce resources on an impossible dream over the last 10 years was unethical.

Furthermore, while India has been polio-free for a year, there has been a huge increase in non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP). In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated. The principle of primum-non-nocere was violated.”