Polio vaccines arrive in Gaza Strip, but distributing them is the next challenge

JERUSALEM – More than 1.2 million doses of the polio vaccine arrived in the Gaza Strip on Aug 26, in preparation for an expansive effort to inoculate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said.

The vaccines landed after

the first case of the disease in the territory

in 25 years was confirmed in August.

Unicef, the UN children’s fund, said it was delivering the vaccines in cooperation with the World Health Organisation, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and other groups.

UNRWA officials said they hoped to deliver the first vaccines to children in Gaza starting Aug 31.

But the campaign will be “a very difficult operation and its success will depend very much on the conditions on the ground at the time”, Mr Sam Rose, a senior official from the agency, said at a news briefing on Aug 26.

The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to begin the campaign to inoculate children under 10 were under way.

It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to medical centres in Gaza, particularly after the UN said on Aug 26 that its hamstrung

humanitarian operations had been brought to a temporary halt

after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Deir al-Balah, where the agency has its central operations.

But a senior UN official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorised to speak publicly about the issue, said at a briefing on Aug 26 that there was no change in plans to begin polio vaccinations, despite the fact that the temporary pause in the UN’s humanitarian mission.

Speaking from Zawaida, in central Gaza, Mr Rose said more than 3,000 people would be involved in the vaccination campaign, about a third of them from UNRWA.

Mobile health teams would help deliver the vaccines to shelters, clinics and schools, but he said a humanitarian pause was needed for parents and children to safely meet aid workers at those sites.

Aid workers “will do our absolute utmost to deliver the campaign because, without it, we know that the conditions will just be worse someday”, Mr Rose said. “It is not guaranteed that it will be a success.”

For children who contract polio, he added, the prospects of receiving proper treatment remain “incredibly bad” while many of Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics are closed or only partly functioning as a result of the conflict.

The WHO chief, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement on Aug 22 that a

10-month-old child in Gaza had contracted polio

and had become paralysed in one leg.

The virus was found in July in wastewater samples, but this was the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter-century.

At least 95 per cent of children in Gaza will need to receive both doses of the vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease and reduce the risk of its re-emergence, according to Unicef, “given the severely disrupted health, water and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip”.

Unicef and the WHO have called on “all parties” in the conflict to put in place a week-long humanitarian pause in Gaza to allow both rounds of vaccines to be delivered, saying that “without the humanitarian pauses, the delivery of the campaign will not be possible”.

Cogat, the Israeli Defence Ministry’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement on Aug 26 that the vaccines had been delivered to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel.

The agency added that the campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses” that it observes, which, it said, would allow Palestinians to reach vaccination centres.

In June, Israel announced that it would observe partial daily suspensions of its military activity in some areas of Gaza, calling them humanitarian pauses, saying they were aimed at making it safer for groups to deliver aid in the territory.

The Gaza Health Ministry has warned that inoculations alone will not be effective amid a lack of clean water and personal hygiene supplies, as well as issues with sewage and waste collection in overcrowded areas where displaced families were sheltering.

It said medical teams would have to spread out across the territory, “which requires an urgent ceasefire”. NYTIMES