Fight online misinformation this World Polio Day
Members of the International PolioPlus Committee seek to counter false narratives
by Etelka Lehoczky
21 Oct 2026Loading component...
Rotary members who launched the effort to eradicate polio decades ago couldn’t have imagined that falsehoods about vaccines would one day spread unchecked on the internet. But today, online misinformation is a major barrier to finally eliminating this devastating disease.
“We read a lot of stuff on Facebook and other social media. One of the toughest things is [that] Facebook’s become totally unreliable as a source of real news,” says Michael K. McGovern, chair of the International PolioPlus Committee. “There’s so many fake pictures, so many staged events.”
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Anti-vaccine propaganda on social media can be dangerous, says Valarie K. Wafer, co-chair of the International PolioPlus Committee. In Pakistan, she noted, the health workers who go door-to-door offering vaccinations have faced hostility and violence from parents who heard online that the health workers are peddling poison.
“We had one situation near Peshawar in Pakistan, it might have been eight years ago now, where [people] faked bad reactions to vaccinations,” says McGovern, a member of the Rotary Club of South Portland-Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA. “And it just takes hold because of social media. It takes years to overcome the memories, the thoughts, that those stories generate.”
There is some good news to report, particularly from Pakistan, the only country besides Afghanistan where cases of wild poliovirus are still found. Aziz Memon, chair of the Pakistan PolioPlus Committee, says the last three immunization drives targeted 45.2 million children each. And he cites “a remarkable improvement” in the environmental samples tested for the presence of poliovirus.
Memon, a member of the Rotary Club of Karachi, Pakistan, also says more effort is going into testing people who travel back and forth across the border with Afghanistan. The highly permeable border has long made it difficult to monitor the virus and reach unvaccinated people, but “those families are being tracked,” Memon says.
And yet, the information war continues. Not only does misinformation about polio and vaccinations continue to proliferate, but positive developments often don’t receive publicity. McGovern says even professional news outlets fail to report on the significance of the eradication effort and the broad support behind it.
“For five straight years, the U.S. government has appropriated US$265 million for polio eradication. If you read the news, you would never guess that,” McGovern said.
Countering anti-vaccine propaganda effectively is even more of a challenge.
“We need to point out the wrong information,” says Wafer, a member of the Rotary Club of Burlington Lakeshore, Ontario, Canada. “But I think we can do it in the context of positive messaging that also reinforces what we’re doing, instead of focusing on the negative stuff.”
“It’s up to all of us to try to counter some of the negativity that we see with positive stories of what we’ve accomplished, because we have accomplished a lot,” Wafer says.
Wafer says the trust that people around the world have in Rotary comes, ultimately, from members joining the eradication effort in person. She remembers how, during her first National Immunization Day, she was at a village in India when someone handed her a four-week-old baby to give the vaccine drops to.
“It wasn’t me they trusted,” she says. “It was the Rotary emblem on the vest I was wearing. That trust is with all of our members, who are there every single day, alongside the frontline workers that are there. I’ve seen that firsthand.”