Bhopal: The mega-pulse polio campaign, launched on Sunday, turned out to be very low profile as the state capital has been utterly devoid of any kind of publicity, such as putting up cut-outs and posters in different parts of the city before launching the event. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan launched this mega-pulse polio campaign. Nearly 90,000 banners and 1.8 lakh posters had been provided for publicity, but were nowhere in sight in the city.
Previously, the health department used to leave no stone unturned for publicity for such kinds of mega-campaigns to raise awareness among the public. Despite knowing that the pulse polio drive is altogether different from the corona vaccination drive, where healthcare workers (HCWs) automatically approached the session sites as they work with the hospitals, no effort seems to have been taken regarding publicity for the event. Pulse polio is directly related to children, so, if people — especially parents — do not have any idea about the campaign, how can they go to the booths for inoculation?
No major school booths
People do not have any idea about the pulse polio campaign as many schools did not have major booths this time. Guards of many institutions, such as Campion Schools, MCU, and Bhojpur Club, denied any knowledge about the pulse polio campaign. There was no cut-out, no poster to raise awareness in society before the mega-pulse polio drive was kick-started targeting 1.1 crore kids of up to 5 years of age in Madhya Pradesh.
3,200 vaccination booths
In Bhopal, there were 3,200 vaccination booths, including District Hospital (JP Hospital), primary health centre, community health centres, angangwadi and others. Similarly, there were 44,685 booths in the state, 2,488 transit booths in 4,117 high-risk areas in the state. Around 89,370 teams, as well as the same number of vaccinators, and 1,609 mobile teams were pressed into service to ensure the success of the pulse polio drive. Around 8,937 were supervisors and 2,802 were defreezers to maintain the cold chain. There were 1.82 crore doses of bivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (bOPV).
