After bin Laden backlash, CIA promises: No more fake vaccination campaigns

After bin Laden backlash, CIA promises: No more fake vaccination campaigns

via Yahoo News Digest

Amid a deadly backlash and a resurgence of polio in Pakistan, the White House has promised that the CIA will never again use a vaccination campaign as a tool of spy craft, according to a May 16 White House letter to university officials and obtained by Yahoo News. The Central Intelligence Agency had enlisted a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to conduct a fake immunization effort in the city of Abbottabad as part of planning for the high-risk May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound there. The letter came nearly a year-and-a-half after the deans of 12 schools of public health wrote a letter to President Barack Obama saying that "as a general principle, public health programs should not be used as cover for covert operations."

"Similarly, the agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs. This CIA policy applies worldwide and to U.S. and non-U.S. persons alike."
— memo from White House aide Lisa Monaco to deans of 12 schools of public health

The agency aimed to confirm intelligence that bin Laden was at the compound by comparing DNA obtained from children living there to a sample from the fugitive al-Qaida chief's late sister, the Guardian newspaper reported in July 2011. Even before those revelations, the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children. But the CIA's actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.