Babar Ata made headlines yet again a British publication accused him for covering up an outbreak of the disease’s P2 strain, the most dangerous polio virus strain.
According to the publication, Dr Malik Safi, coordinator of the national emergency operation center of the Pakistan polio eradication program, confirmed the P2 outbreak, but would not give any further comment.
Under Pakistani law, every new case of polio in the country has to be officially registered with the government, which then alerts international health bodies. “But to hide their negligence and their poor performance, Babar Bin Atta decided not disclose the cases to anyone,” said the source.
However, Babar has denied the accusations in the report by The Guardian and termed them “baseless”.
The Guardian report is absolutely baseless, I am writing to them to correct the record & issue an apology, failing which, I shall pursue my legal options. I shall be sending relevant documents to @guardian to prove their “He Said – She Said” report wrong. Enough of this slander.
— Babar Atta (@babarbinatta) November 8, 2019
“I wish, I just wish, if Guardian had contacted me even once for my version. They even don’t know that Pakistan reported a bigger VDPV outbreak in 2016/17 in Balochistan. Noone blamed Ayesha Raza (PMLN) & today the same Attention seeking Ayesha Raza is quoted by The Guardian,” he said in a Tweet on Friday.
The former focal person further said that he would be writing to the publication to “correct the record and issue an apology”, otherwise he would pursue legal options.
Alongside Afghanistan, Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world that has not entirely eradicated polio. It was a key milestone in 2014 when Pakistan officially declared it had entirely eradicated the P2 strain of polio virus.
