WHO said Thursday that it has reached an agreement with Israel for limited pauses in the fighting to allow for the vaccination campaign to take place. Even so, such a large-scale campaign will pose major difficulties in a territory blanketed in rubble, where 90% of Palestinians are displaced.
Where are the vaccines now?
Around 1.3 million doses of the vaccine traveled through the Kerem Shalom checkpoint and are currently being held in “cold-chain storage” in a warehouse in Deir al-Balah. That means the warehouse is able to maintain the correct temperature so the vaccines do not lose their potency.
Another shipment of 400,000 doses is set to be delivered to Gaza soon.
The vaccines will be trucked to distribution sites by a team of over 2,000 medical volunteers, said Ammar Ammar, a spokesperson for UNICEF.
What challenges lie ahead?
Mounting any sort of campaign that requires traversing the Gaza Strip and interacting with its medical system is bound to pose difficulties.
The U.N. estimates that approximately 65% of the total road network in Gaza has been damaged. Nineteen of the strip’s 36 hospitals are out of service.
The north of the territory is cut off from the south, and travel between the two areas has been challenging throughout the war because of Israeli military operations. Aid groups have had to suspend trips due to security concerns, after convoys were targeted by the Israeli military.
Peeperkorn said Friday that WHO cannot do house-to-house vaccinations in Gaza, as they have in other polio campaigns. When asked about the viability of the effort, Peeperkorn said WHO thinks “it is feasible if all the pieces of the puzzle are in place.”
How many doses do children need and what happens if they miss a dose?
The WHO says children typically need about three to four doses of oral polio vaccine — two drops per dose — to be protected against polio. If they don’t receive all of the doses, they are vulnerable to infection.
Doctors have previously found that children who are malnourished or who have other illnesses might need more than 10 doses of the oral polio vaccine to be fully protected.
Are there side effects?
Yes, but they are very rare.
Billions of doses of the oral vaccine have been given to children worldwide and it is safe and effective. But in about 1 in 2.7 million doses, the live virus in the vaccine can paralyze the child who receives the drops.
How did this outbreak in Gaza start?
The polio virus that triggered this latest outbreak is a mutated virus from an oral polio vaccine. The oral polio vaccine contains weakened live virus and in very rare cases, that virus is shed by those who are vaccinated and can evolve into a new form capable of starting new epidemics.
i'm scared, nother saber rattling red line......hey pootyPutin: lifting Ukraine missile restrictions would put Nato ‘at war’ with Russia
Comments come after Antony Blinken hints US will lift restrictions on Kyiv’s use of weapons inside Russiawww.theguardian.com
Does pootin not realize that there are probably thousands of conventional weapons trained on strategic targets all over Russia and more than a few nuclear weapons at the ready should he dare to cross that line.i'm scared, nother saber rattling red line......hey pooty
i was just reading this in the AP news.......there are a few more vids out now btw.....there is one where a man is just standing outside and it goes off close to his hand.....
I don't know anything about this YouTube account other than they had the video I was looking for:
It shows this guys hip getting blown out but nothing else affected.
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I question the immediate pointing out of the Israeli Military attack when it could just be that the leadership was scared shitless of what was on those pagers and decided to purge them. It will be interesting how this shakes out.
I heard on the BBC that the pagers did get really hot before exploding. The IDF (or whatever their spooks are called) sent a message to the pagers, and they blew up the next time they were touched. They changed to pagers because their phones were not secure enough.looks like it also goes and at ta che in the Iranian Embassy too......it's either an attack or the batteries exploded...hard to say...
Hezbollah is hit by a wave of exploding pagers that killed at least 9 people and injured thousands
Hundreds of handheld pagers exploded near simultaneously in parts of Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people — including members of the militant group Hezbollah and a young girl.apnews.com
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the pagers that exploded in Lebanon and Syria but that another company based in Budapest manufactured them.
Pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah exploded near-simultaneously Tuesday in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people, including an 8-year-old girl, and wounding more than 2,000. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated remote attack.
The AR-924 pagers were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in Hungary’s capital, according to a statement released Wednesday by Gold Apollo.
“According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC,” the statement read.
Gold Apollo chair Hsu Ching-kuang told journalists Wednesday that his company has had a licensing agreement with BAC for the past three years, but did not provide evidence of the contract.
At about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.
It appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah, but it was not immediately clear if non-Hezbollah members also carried any of the exploding pagers.
The blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
Experts believe explosive material was put into the pagers prior to their delivery and use in a sophisticated supply chain infiltration.
The AR-924 pager, advertised as being “rugged,” contains a rechargeable lithium battery, according to specifications once advertised on Gold Apollo’s website before it was apparently taken down Tuesday after the sabotage attack. It could receive texts of up to 100 characters.
It also claimed to have up to 85 days of battery life. That would be crucial in Lebanon, where electricity outages have been common after years of economic collapse. Pagers also run on a different wireless network than mobile phones, making them more resilient in emergencies — one of the reasons why many hospitals worldwide still rely on them.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said from the beginning of 2022 until August 2024, Gold Apollo has exported 260,000 sets of pagers, including more than 40,000 sets between January and August of this year. The ministry said the pagers were exported mainly to European and American countries and that it had no records of direct exports of Gold Apollo pagers to Lebanon.
For Hezbollah, the militants also looked at the pagers as a means to sidestep what’s believed to be intensive Israeli electronic surveillance on mobile phone networks in Lebanon.
“The phone that we have in our hands — I do not have a phone in my hand — is a listening device,” warned Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in a February speech.
He later added: “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent. It is a deadly agent, not a simple one. It is a deadly agent that provides specific and accurate information. Therefore, this requires great seriousness when confronting it.”
I wish you and everyone else the best and hope you all stay safe if this is not just a lot of noise that the worlds dictators are making in the hopes they can get their Orange Reek here in America reelected.Oh yeah things should be interesting here soon
I live close to the Lebanese border
Our artillery and F16 is grinding them daily
It's really a lost cause for these people, go against israel ? Lolol you must be crazy
Israel is mini USA bro
But these arabs just don't get it, they love death more than life, oh well
It wouldn't surprise me if the CIA had a off-record hand in this masterful coordinated attack that tooks months maybe years in the planning. CIA has a long institutional memory stretching back to the kidnapping and horrific torture of Bill Buckley, the Beirut barracks bombing and U.S. embassy bombings all of the 1980's. The assassination (Joint CIA-Mossad) of Imad Mughniyeh (as retaliation for the preceding), in 2008, took decades.Hezbollah had been doing everything it could to keep the fight from expanding. Now they will have no choice but to respond to this. But responding will not be easy. The attack did wound 4K of their fighters, and they don't have any way to talk to each other. Not to mention that their bosses had gave them the pagers, so trust will be an issue.
This will not help our goals to end the war, but goddamn if the IDF don't have some brass.