> Pakistan and Afganistan

Interesting there was a fake vaccination campaign conducted by our security forces in those countries.

https://www.vox.com/first-person/22256595/vaccine-covid-paki...

Which has likely undermined peoples confidence in vaccines from those communities.

I never understood why this is the position that media has taken. Do you also blame Dr. Fauci for the American vaccine deniers?

A doctor worked with American intelligence agencies to find the most wanted terrorist in the world. He is then imprisoned in Pakistan on made up charges, and is still in prison. Does the media sympathize with his plight. No. There is barely any coverage of this after 2012. Instead, the media is so concerned with low vaccination rates.

Is there a reason that media seems so biased to ignore a person's plight? A person who should be celebrated like a hero, not blamed like this.

Fauci didn't make a fake covid vaccine.

In this fake vaccination program, we endangered health of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world in order to catch someone who had pretty well fallen off the map and wasn't an active threat to anyone for...political points?

I have nothing to back this assertion up, but I bet the number of deaths caused by vaccine hesitancy in that part of the world due to this incident is going to dwarf the number who died in 9/11 all said and done. Was that worth it?

Fauci didn't make a fake vaccine but he certainly pushed vaccines in a very dishonest manner. He played a huge role in destroying my faith in the CDC and the FDA.

Oh you didn’t like this one?

“To achieve herd immunity, 60% of the population must be vaccinated”

Next interview, 65%. Next interview, 70%. Then 75%

While knowing the entire time that herd immunity is impossible with a leaky vaccine.

Oh there are many missinformation acpects that got pushed about https://www.france24.com/en/20200919-polio-vaccine-in-the-cr...

EDIT - definitly worth a read and the aspect worth a quote "However, there still exists a version of the illness known as vaccine-derived polio, which occurs in rare incidents when the weakened virus in the vaccine mutates." Which is the instance at play here in the London sewage monitoring.

The fake vaccination campaign story is plausible, because of the CIA's historic practices, but it is not credible.

I dug in and was surprised to see that the reporting does not substantiate the narrative. Read the links in that Vox article: you'll see that the story exhibits all the hallmarks of a government-sponsored disinformation campaign. The only sources in the primary reporting (the Guardian article) are from the ISI - Pakistani intelligence. [1]

The New York Times' articles hint at an alternative story, which is that the ISI needed to produce something to dampen public anger over the raid that led to Osama Bin Laden's death [2]. (That's my own crude, reductive version - it's surely more complicated than that, given the uncomfortable relationship between aid agencies and the Pakistani government):

> Dr. Afridi has told interrogators for the top Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI, that he was introduced to the C.I.A. through Save the Children, according to Pakistani officials and Western aid workers. Save the Children vigorously denies the claim, saying it has been made a scapegoat by a desperate man who, according to senior American officials, has been tortured in Pakistani custody.

Further along in the same article, we're given more reason not to take this story at face value:

> Dr. Afridi had a reputation for hustling as well as healing, and he faced multiple allegations of corruption and professional malpractice, according to officials, colleagues and government papers seen by The New York Times.

> At his private practice, several patients claimed he performed improper operations to make extra money, prompting a local warlord named Mangal Bagh to detain him for a week in 2008 until he paid a fine of $11,100

Again, it's certainly possible that the gist of the story is correct, but from the publicly available reporting on it, we only have the word of the CIA's counterpart.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/world/asia/bin-laden-raid...

Your comment is the one everyone needs to read.

The vaccine used in the UK is not an attenuated virus. So this was “ imported”. The news is likely being circumspect due to concerns of profiling immigrants or refugees or religious communities most prevalent where this vaccine is used.

So far no cases have been found of transmission between people.

I would be interested to know the sensitivity of the test they are using.

Samples are concentrated, then cultured in L20B (mouse cells with polio receptors added) and human rhabdosarcoma (RD) cells) to screen for either non-polio enteroviruses (very common). Samples which are L20B +ve (i.e. likely have polio) are then further passaged into RD for virus growth and RT-PCR to get the polio serotype and intratype.

Many places which have the resources will then do a full sequence on any +ve samples as well to determine whether there is community transmission since this will show up as a number of related viruses which are all related to each other more closely than they are to the parent strain.

London screening frequently sees unrelated OPV strains which are due to people who have recently been vaccinated with OPV in places where that is still the preferred vaccine, what is concerning here is that the deep sequencing shows that there appears to be some person to person spread of a vaccine derived strain.

To answer your question, this is a highly sensitive and extremely specific test. Details no doubt available in the open literature somewhere.

> I would be interested to know the sensitivity of the test they are using.

Bet that isn't discussed anywhere.

So you can't really have sensitivity and specificity in the classic sense because you are not able to gold standard classify the infection of an individual. However, here is some research on the mater...

>The location and timing of poliomyelitis cases showed spatial and temporal variability. The sensitivity of AFP surveillance to detect serotype 1 poliovirus infection in a district and its neighbours per month was on average 30.0% (95% CI 24.8–35.8) and increased with the incidence of poliomyelitis cases. The average population sensitivity of a single environmental sample was 59.4% (95% CI 55.4–63.0), with significant variation in site-specific estimates (median varied from 33.3–79.2%). The combined population sensitivity of environmental and AFP surveillance in a given month was on average 98.1% (95% CI 97.2–98.7), assuming four samples per month for each site. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12879-018-3070-4

>Four quarterly visits were made to 78 ES sites in 21 states of Nigeria, and ES site characteristic data were matched to 1345 samples with an average enterovirus prevalence among sites of 68% (range, 9%–100%). A larger estimated catchment population, high total dissolved solids, and higher pH were associated with enterovirus detection. A random forests model predicted “good” sites (enterovirus prevalence >70%) from measured site characteristics with out-of-sample sensitivity and specificity of 75%. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/225/8/1377/5818305?logi...

Other discussion of environmental surveillance for polio:

https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/AEM.07972-11

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12560-017-9314-4

This isn’t an outbreak - probably. It’s someone shedding virus particles following vaccination

Honestly folks on holiday without vaccinations against such things should not be allowed to move around. It's already bad that they don't care to protect their own community.

In this case the virus is a result of one of the polio vaccines.

Whomever brought it would very possibly have done the right thing and gotten vaccinated recently, but the live attenuated polio vaccine very occasionally leads to shed attenuated polio virus reverting to full strength.

And that's definitely the reason they didn't get vaccinated, which probably wasn't fundamentally egocentric at all /s

Huh? They did get vaccinated.

EDIT: It is possible the import could have come from an unvaccinated person too, having gotten it from someone who has been vaccinated. But that the virus is vaccine-derived means the ultimate source is someone who got the vaccine.

I realize this might be a shock… But vaccines fail all the time. Their immunity wanes, they cause adverse events and sometimes they spawn rogue strains like what happened with Polio.

BTW we have a case study unfolding real time on restricting people’s travel based on vaccination status. As the COVID-19 vaccine does not prevent transmission, infection or spread, it was a complete disaster. Meanwhile unvaccinated people with natural immunity who don’t spread were unfairly punished for noncompliance.

They were vaccinated... If you read the article, the headline is "Vaccine-derived poliovirus... detected" When you take the oral polio vaccine, its a live virus and sometimes that virus can be spread. So in this case, someone who had likely recently been vaccinated via the oral vaccine used a toilet in London and the virus was detected in the sewers.