Pakistan Runs Week-Long Polio Drive for 31 Million Children as Bannu Access Gaps Persist

Pakistan is running a week-long polio vaccination campaign through September 27, 2026, aiming to reach roughly 31 million children under five across 115 districts — a nationwide push deployed against a backdrop of the country's lowest annual case count in years, even as one district continues to drive most of the remaining cases.

The scale of this round

The campaign, which began September 21, covers 13 districts in Punjab, 30 in Sindh, 37 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 32 in Balochistan, Islamabad, and two districts in Gilgit-Baltistan. More than 273,000 polio workers have been deployed to vaccinate children at their homes, at transit points, and in hospitals. In Karachi alone, the drive is targeting around 2.5 million children under five.

Why the case count still matters despite the decline

Pakistan has recorded four confirmed wild poliovirus cases in 2026, down sharply from 31 in 2025 and 74 in 2024, with environmental surveillance samples also showing positivity rates below 10%. The most recent case — an eight-month-old child from Nurar Union Council in Bannu's Miryan tehsil — was confirmed in September, bringing the year's Bannu-linked total to three of the four national cases.

That concentration is the reason this campaign matters beyond its raw numbers. Health officials have said polio teams have been unable to consistently reach children in parts of Bannu Division since 2025 because of security-related access constraints, allowing the virus to keep circulating in pockets even as the disease retreats nationally. A national campaign of this scale is partly a numbers game and partly an attempt to close those specific access gaps before they seed further cases.

The security-and-health overlap

Bannu sits in a part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that has also seen elevated militant activity this year, which is the same dynamic underlying Pakistan's recent security operations along the Afghan border. Public health campaigns in these districts depend on the same security conditions that shape Pakistan's broader counter-militancy coverage — when access to a union council is cut off by fighting or the threat of it, vaccination teams cannot follow the same replanning that eventually reaches other regions.

What comes after this round

Government officials have framed the campaign as the year's next major push toward interrupting transmission entirely, following an earlier nationwide round in the first half of 2026. Whether Pakistan can close out 2026 without further cases will depend heavily on whether Bannu's access constraints ease before the virus finds another child to infect. Build Better Pakistan will update this piece once the campaign concludes and coverage figures are released.

Build Better Pakistan's Health Desk tracks Pakistan's polio eradication programme and the public-health effects of restricted access in conflict-affected districts.