LONDON: Support from Arab Gulf countries for the global campaign to wipe out polio are “extremely important,” health officials said Tuesday, as vaccination efforts face a severe funding shortfall.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has lost a third of its budget for 2026 due to cuts in foreign aid, predominantly from the US and Europe.
GCC countries, however, have boosted support for the campaign, with Ƶ committing $500 million to the project through KSrelief earlier this year.
Leaders from the initiative said support from the Gulf had been particularly important given their relations with the two counties where the risk from polio is highest — Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“The political, moral and financial support of GCC countries is extremely important, especially now,” Jamal Ahmed, the World Health Organization’s director of polio eradication, told a media briefing Tuesday.
“The endemic countries are within the (WHO’s) Eastern Mediterranean Region — it’s Pakistan and Afghanistan — and the governments and the people who can really help us are from that same region and the leadership has been fantastic.”
GPEI, a partnership of nations and organizations including the Gates Foundation, UNICEF and Rotary International, said it is prioritizing Afghanistan and Pakistan as it streamlines operations to adjust to the budget cuts.
The two countries are the last strongholds of wild poliovirus despite vaccination campaigns almost eradicating the disease there in 2023. There has since been a major resurgence that peaked last year but has started to decline again.
This year there have been 36 cases in Afghanistan and Pakistan of wild polio, which mostly affects young children and can leave them paralyzed.
Hamid Jafari, who leads polio eradication efforts in WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region, said Ƶ and the UAE are providing “strong political and financial support for polio eradication in the region.”
He said the resurgence in Afghanistan and Pakistan of the highly infectious disease showed the challenges of trying to eradicate it.
“It will keep coming back to cause periodic outbreaks until its transmission is completely stopped,” Jafari said.
Security challenges, political instability, moving populations and vaccine hesitancy make vaccinating every child in those countries immensely difficult.
The GPEI recently published its road map for 2026, which outlines how the vaccination effort will adapt to tighter budgets, with more efficient vaccination campaigns and screening for the disease.
However, there remains a $1.7 billion funding gap for the initiative up to 2029 and the officials said they had cut campaigns in low-risk areas and were focusing on specific regions rather than entire nations to save costs.
The initiative will also prioritize outbreaks affecting southern and central Africa, the Horn of Africa, Yemen and the Lake Chad Basin.
Wars in Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere have also presented a serious challenge to attempts to vaccinate children in those countries.
“All conflicts are a huge setback,” Jafari said. “Health systems and immunization systems get destroyed or weakened, populations move, vaccination coverage starts to decline rapidly, and this is what we see repeatedly in so many countries.”
Since the GPEI was launched in 1988, global incidence of polio has decreased by 99.9 percent, saving 1.5 million lives and stopping an estimated 20 million cases of paralysis.
