The World Health Organization will launch a massive immunization campaign Monday targeting 63 million children in 10 African countries as a polio outbreak spreads from heavily Muslim northern Nigeria. Islamic leaders in the heart of the Nigerian outbreak say they will uphold their ban on the polio vaccine, calling it part of a U.S. plot to spread infertility or AIDS among Muslims... Targeted countries for the immunization campaign include Nigeria, where the northern state of Kano is one of the largest remaining reservoirs of the polio virus in Africa. Islamic leaders in Kano and two other northern states say the international polio campaign is a U.S. plot to kill Nigeria’s Muslims by spreading the AIDS virus or agents that cause sterility. Kano state officials claim their own lab tests have found estrogen and other female hormones in the vaccine.
| Can't be a proper Islamist with a bosom... |
Hoping to prove the vaccine’s safety, Nigeria on Sunday dispatched a 12-member team of scientists, government officials and Muslims leaders to labs in South Africa, Indonesia and India to witness tests. The fact-finding team was due back late Thursday. Influential northern Islamic leaders have rejected the mission’s findings in advance.
| "Evidence? We don't need no steekin' evidence!" |
"We’ll not accept whatever result they bring back because the federal government is not sincere," Nasiu Baba Ahmed, secretary-general of the Supreme Council for the Implementation of Sharia in Nigeria, told The Associated Press. "They went and hired some traditional rulers as members of the team. Are those traditional rulers scientists? How could they determine whether or not the vaccine is contaminated when they have no knowledge of science?" Ahmed asked.
| "I, too, lack any knowledge of science at all, and I can tell you it's contaminated! Yes! Contaminated with Western thought! Contaminated with Western ideas! Within each dose of vaccine there are floating millions and millions of tiny boobies, waiting to sprout on manly, turban-wearing men!" |
"That is why we cannot accept whatever result they bring back from that that trip."
There’s more if you want to read on. I just can’t figure out why we even bother with these people. Is it possible to quarantine a country from the rest of the world? |