JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In Gaza, a massive polio vaccination effort is underway. Hundreds of thousands of children will hopefully receive vaccines after a baby boy was diagnosed with the first confirmed case of polio in Gaza in a quarter century. Children in Gaza are typically vaccinated against the virus. But since the war began, regular infant vaccinations have been severely disrupted. According to the World Health Organization, Israel has agreed to brief pauses in the fighting to allow families to reach health workers and safely return. Dr. Hamid Jafari is the Director of Polio Eradication for the WHO's eastern Mediterranean region. He is leading the Gaza vaccination efforts and joins me now from Amman, Jordan. Welcome.
HAMID JAFARI: Thank you. Happy to be with you.
SUMMERS: As I understand it, health workers have just three days to administer some 600,000 vaccines. Can you just start by telling us how it's going so far?
JAFARI: So yesterday was the first day. Overall, it was a very satisfying day. First and foremost, there wasn't an adverse security incident, and that is the No. 1 success. So at the end of the first day, the estimate is that 86,600-plus children under 10 got vaccinated.
SUMMERS: Wow.
JAFARI: Today was the second day - and, again, brilliant that we had no security incident - and that's perhaps the biggest success so far.
SUMMERS: You've mentioned the fact that there have been no security incidents several times. I'm curious - how are your colleagues, who, to be clear, are working in a war zone - how have they been able to not just do their job to ensure that these young people in Gaza are able to be vaccinated, but also to keep themselves safe as they do this?
JAFARI: This is what we were most anxious about before the start of the campaign, which is, will all parties stick to the commitment to a humanitarian pause for vaccination? I think the most important thing is to give confidence to the families, to the communities, that they can come out of their shelters, that they can move around and there wouldn't be an air strike or a sniper attack or an immediate order for evacuation. Remember, Gaza had 99% vaccination - childhood vaccination coverage. So this is a community that seeks vaccination, recognizes the value of preventive health and vaccination. So the vaccine demand is there.
SUMMERS: Your colleagues at the WHO, who are distributing these vaccines there on the ground - can you tell us a bit about what they're seeing there in terms of the conditions and what they're hearing from families?
JAFARI: Well, I think some of the video footage that I've seen and what our colleagues are saying, is this - that some families have even dressed up their children as they've brought them up for vaccination - little girls wearing bows in their hair. Some kids are scared. Some kids are, you know, demonstrating that that they're really brave in taking the drops. Some are nervous about the finger-marking. You know, every child that is vaccinated gets their little left pinky painted so that, after the end of the campaign, the coverage can be monitored through checking finger-marking. But it's happening.
SUMMERS: What are the next steps here? Are there - will you move to other locations in Gaza or perhaps getting people to come back for booster shots? What happens next?
JAFARI: It will take very, very high levels of coverage to stop this outbreak in Gaza and prevent its international spread. So these three days may not be enough. So the agreement is that we will be assessing coverage every day, and particularly on the final day, to see whether there are still unvaccinated children and we would need an extra day.
SUMMERS: That's Dr. Hamid Jafari of the World Health Organization. Thank you for your time.
JAFARI: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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