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Robert Wood, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., urged Israel to avoid further civilian evacuation orders during the pauses and said workers need security to vaccinate children.
“It is especially important for Israel to facilitate access for agencies carrying out the vaccination campaign and for it to ensure periods of calm and refrain from military operations during vaccination campaign periods,” he said.
The campaign comes after 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the virus that vaccinated people shed in their waste, scientists say. The baby boy was not vaccinated because he was born just before Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and Israel launched a retaliatory offensive on Gaza.
He is one of hundreds of thousands of children who missed vaccinations because of the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decadeslong effort by the WHO and partners to wipe out the disease. Health care workers in Gaza have been warning of the potential for a polio outbreak for months, as the humanitarian crisis unleashed by Israel’s offensive grows.
Displaced Palestinians often live in crowded tent camps, near heaps of garbage and dirty wastewater flowing into the streets that aid workers describe as breeding grounds for diseases like polio, spread through fecal matter.
The polio strain that the 10-month-old contracted evolved from a weakened virus that was originally part of an oral vaccine but had been removed from the vaccine in 2016 in hopes of preventing vaccine-derived outbreaks. Public health authorities knew that decision would leave people unprotected against that particular strain, with scientists saying the case is the result of “an unqualified failure” of public health policy.
AP writers Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/who-announces-deal-with-israel-to-allow-limited-pauses-in-gaza-fighting-for-polio-vaccinations