The Pakistan polio drive that began on 2 November has ended with more than 23.8 million children under five vaccinated against polio across 97 districts, the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) announced on Sunday, taking the week-long campaign close to its target of about 24 million children. The drive ran from 2 to 8 November, and it was the fifth major anti-polio campaign Pakistan has run in 2026.
The result completes the story that began a week earlier. When the campaign was launched, Good News Pakistan reported that vaccination teams set out to reach 24 million children in 97 districts. The final tally of more than 23.8 million means the teams reached about 99 percent of the children they planned to cover, a strong return for a drive of this size, run in a single week across the whole country.
The Pakistan polio drive in numbers
- More than 23.8 million children under five vaccinated
- 97 districts covered between 2 and 8 November
- More than 200,000 frontline polio workers took part
- Target for the round: about 24 million children
- Punjab led the provinces, with over 9.1 million children vaccinated in 13 districts
- The fifth major drive of 2026, and the third sub-national campaign of the year
Behind those numbers sits one of the largest peacetime mobilisations anywhere in the world. A sub-national drive does not try to cover every district in the country; it concentrates on the districts where health officials judge the risk of the virus circulating to be highest, which is why this round covered 97 districts rather than all of them. Teams went door to door in cities, towns and villages, carrying the vaccine in cold boxes and working from lists of the households in their area. In the northern hills they walked steep paths between scattered homes so that no settlement was skipped. Each child received two drops of oral polio vaccine, and workers marked the finger of every vaccinated child so the coverage could be checked house by house. Where a child was away or asleep on the first visit, the teams went back.
A campaign run in step with Afghanistan
The drive did not stop at Pakistan’s borders. The November round of the Pakistan polio drive was conducted at the same time as a matching campaign in Afghanistan, as part of a coordinated regional effort to stop the virus moving between the two countries, which remain the last places on earth where wild poliovirus still circulates. Health officials on both sides have long argued that the disease can only be beaten if children across the border are vaccinated in the same rounds, because families, trade and travel move constantly between the two countries and the virus moves with them.
A health worker marks a child’s finger after giving polio drops outside a tent, the sign that one more child is counted.
Photo: CDC Global, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nine cases in 2026 explain why the rounds keep coming
For all the progress, Pakistan is not yet polio free. The NEOC says the country has recorded nine polio cases so far in 2026, seven in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and two in Sindh. When Good News Pakistan reported on the polio case count for 2026 in October, the tally stood at seven; two more cases have been confirmed since then, taking the year’s total to nine. Each case is a child paralysed by a disease that two drops of vaccine can prevent.
That is why the drives repeat every few weeks rather than once a year. Polio has no cure, and a single child who misses the drops can still catch the virus and pass it on, which is why the programme measures itself on the children it misses, not only the millions it reaches. The NEOC also used the week to urge parents to complete their children’s routine immunisation on schedule, since protection against polio works best as part of the full set of childhood vaccines.
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Missed the team? The helpline is still open
The NEOC says parents whose children missed a visit can call the polio helpline at 1166, or send a WhatsApp message to 0346-7776546, and vaccination teams will arrange to reach them. Officials repeated the appeal they close every round with: two drops, every time, for every child under five, because immunity against polio is built round by round, and a child is only fully protected when no round is missed.
The same public health spirit runs through the rest of the system, from these door-to-door drives to institutions such as SIUT in Karachi, where treatment is free for every patient who walks in. For polio, the work continues in the background between drives: surveillance teams keep testing for the virus, and the next rounds are already being planned, so the Pakistan polio drive will roll out again in the coming months as Pakistan and Afghanistan press on with the shared goal of ending the disease for good.
Sources
- Arab News Pakistan: Pakistan vaccinates over 23.8 million children in six days of anti-polio drive
- UrduPoint: Over 23.8 million children vaccinated against polio in six days
- NextUp News: Pakistan vaccinates 23.8 million children as week-long polio drive ends
- Featured image: Polio workers walk a hillside path to reach remote homes in Pakistan (CDC Global, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
- In-body image: A health worker marks a child’s finger after giving polio drops outside a tent (CDC Global, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.