Abrar Khan, a campaigner with the Karachi polio vaccination team, regularly visits different schools in his neighbourhood to raise awareness about the crippling disease. For him, the task is twice as difficult as for his fellow campaigners because he is unable to walk properly, having himself been afflicted by polio in the 80’s.

“At that time there was no proper vaccination programme in Pakistan and therefore my parents did not know about getting the vaccine,” Abrar says.

He has been hired by the government of Sindh to create awareness about the necessity of polio drops and he serves a living example of what may happen if their children do not get the vaccine.

When he makes his rounds however, he gets as much scepticism as he does sympathy.

“Many parents still resist the vaccine, as they believe in many conspiracies. Some think it’s a Western conspiracy to sterilise the next generation, while others think that this campaign is a cover for some kind of spy programme.”

Abrar has heard it all, and he is clear about who is to blame.

“Many Urdu newspapers and magazines publish material to the effect that polio drops are not good for children, and then religious clerics use these articles to prove their conspiracy theories,” Abrar says.

To substantiate his claim, Abrar has been maintaining a file for the last three years or so. It contains newspaper and magazine clippings from Daily Ummat, Zarb-i-Momin and other such right-wing publications.

Abrar shows a front page article published in the Daily Ummat a couple of days before the attack on polio teams in December 2012, which left six health workers dead. “This article says polio vaccine is not good for children. Reading this, anyone could have thought that it was their duty to stop the teams,” he argues.

The paper also ran an ‘investigative’ series on polio in 2013, churning out conspiracy theories about the vaccine.

The writer of the article in question refused to comment. In a telephonic conversation that ended rather abruptly he said, “There are multiple sources on the internet that verify our claims of polio vaccine being not good for children.”

The other newspaper that Abrar pointed out was Zarb-i-Momin, which was launched in 1990s by Al-Rashid Trust. After 9/11, the US cracked down on this organisation, accusing it of financing international terrorism. The organisation has gone underground ever since, but continues to publish the paper in both English and Urdu.

And its propaganda is often swallowed whole.

Take the case of a village of Lakki Marwat district, which is close to the Waziristan Agencies where Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist organisations are headquartered and have banned the entry of polio teams. In this village, more than 80 per cent of the families refused polio vaccination even though the ban was never enforced here.

Much of this is thanks to clerics like Mir Zahi Khan who, according to local health authorities, has been going around convincing families to say no to the polio vaccine.

“Polio drops are like poison,” Khan says as he reaches out for a file in a shelf inside his single-room seminary where he teaches the Quran to local students. The file contains photocopies of newspaper clippings and pamphlets, mostly from Zarb-i-Momin which state that the drops are ‘haraam’.

“How can the Americans, who are working with the Jews, be our friends? The Quran tells us that they are enemies of Islam,” he angrily replies when asked why he suspects a conspiracy behind polio drops.

The consequences of such rhetoric can be crippling, and in many cases, those who believed the conspiracies end up regretting their naivety. One such person is Saif-ul-Islam who lives in Mohib Banda, a village in the Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. His two-year-old daughter, Solaim, is his favourite child not because she is the youngest, but because she contracted polio in 2012, which left her lower body completely paralysed.

“If I had allowed her to be vaccinated, she would not have lost her legs,” Islam says in a visibly shaken voice, adding that he cannot stop thinking about the day when he said no to the polio team that visited his home a few weeks before his daughter was attacked by the virus. “I regret it every day. I worry about her future. Who will take care of her when we are not there?” Islam adds.

Islam refused polio drops because he was swayed by what the elders and religious clerics in his village said. He mentions a known cleric near his house, a preacher at one the largest mosques in the area, who was particularly virulent against the vaccine. A visit to that mosque there proves that the administration does not welcome inquiring journalists.

However, people leaving the mosque after Friday prayers are not shy about their views on the vaccine.

“There is pig fat in it,” a bearded man in his early 20s exclaims. Others shout ‘yes’ in unison. “They want to sterile our children. It is a conspiracy by the West to eradicate the Muslim population,” another one adds. They cite Zarb-i-Momin as their source, saying: “It contains detailed proofs.”

There has also been material in some English newspapers which condemns the polio eradication campaign in Pakistan as simply being an effort to make money and blames it for causing polio-related paralysis instead of preventing it.

However, most of the time such articles are written by non-medical experts and are selectively researched. One such article in a major English language daily used data for largely discredited websites and ‘experts’ to make its point.

“There is an anti-vaccine lobby out there in the West as well because they think multi-national pharmaceutical companies are behind these efforts and are only out to make profits. What they forget is that many organisations like the Bill Gates Foundation, etc. are doing this for philanthropic reasons,” says Dr Tariq Bhutta, who heads the National Immunisation Technical Advisory Group in Pakistan.

According to Dr Bhutta, the propaganda has taken a serious toll. “Thirty-nine cases were reported last year in Waziristan — the highest in the world, which clearly shows that the vaccine ban worsened the situation. We even have fatwas from religious clerics, yet some people like to believe in conspiracy theories and, just because they are suspicious of multi-nationals are actually siding with the Taliban and ruining the future of our next generation,” he says.