It
is a subject that the Taliban and Jenny McCarthy agree on. They both oppose vaccinations.
Of course, the Taliban take it a bit further. In 2012, they declared war on the
public health workers conducting Pakistan’s Polio vaccination campaign—and lo
and behold, Polio contraction skyrocketed among Pakistani children. Threatened
health official try to reverse the tide in Tom Roberts’ Every Last Child (trailer here), which screens during this year’s DOC NYC.
There
is no excuse for the volume of Polio cases sweeping Pakistan, but there is an
explanation. Claiming it sterilizes boys and hastens the maturation of girls,
the Taliban launched a perverse misinformation campaign against the national Polio
vaccination program, finding an all too receptive audience amid the
drone-obsessed fundamentalist population. As a result, Pakistan became an
incubator of Polio, spreading the water-borne disease to neighboring countries
through contaminated rivers.
Roberts
takes the observational approach throughout ELC,
so he rarely challenges anyone directly. It would be nice to see him confront smug
vaccination opponents with the fruits of their demagoguery, but he presumably
wanted to live. However, he never shies away from documenting the catastrophic
repercussions. We watch an anguished father taking his Polio-stricken son for physical
therapy and witness the vaccination volunteer mourning her assassinated sister
and niece.
There
is no shortage of galling human tragedy in ELC,
but some of the most compelling sequences capture the World Health Organization
point man’s attempts at crisis management. In a mind-boggling turn of events,
they decide to drop the “discredited” word Polio, re-branding their campaign “Justice
for Health,” which might be a winning strategy, but represents a crime against
syntax.
