Today's Edition
ISIDORA CIRIC (ABU DHABI)
Two weeks after world leaders pledged nearly $2 billion in the UAE to eradicate polio, the focus is now on converting those figures into frontline results, and the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) polio chief says Abu Dhabi’s growing leadership in global health is helping keep that promise alive at a time when traditional donors are showing fatigue.
“Abu Dhabi has been at the leadership table, pushing the region forward, and the emirate has been at the forefront of innovation and new technology, especially when it comes to health,” Dr Jamal Ahmed, the WHO’s Director for Polio Eradication, said in a recent interview with Aletihad.
“In addition to that, Abu Dhabi has been one of the leading entities advocating for disease eradication and disease elimination. They host GLIDE here, they support neglected tropical diseases — they have been very supportive for many years.”
The Global Polio Pledge is the third event of its kind that the country has convened, after successfully raising $6.6 billion in previous cycles. During the December 8 round, the UAE alone pledged $140 million through the Mohamed Bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity, bringing Abu Dhabi's total polio eradication contributions to $525 million since 2011.
Dr Ahmed said that, prior to the initiative, polio was paralysing more than 1,000 children every day across 125 countries. Now, it’s only endemic in two countries - Afghanistan and Pakistan - but the virus continues to reappear elsewhere through variant strains, often in areas where health systems are weak, or misinformation spreads faster than science.
He described the Abu Dhabi pledging moment as an “important” jolt, one which motivates the entire global health community “to push through that last mile and get the job done once again.”
And besides adding fresh funding, Dr Ahmed argued, this energy from newer backers in the Gulf and wider Asia also widens the base of support at a time when public appetite in long-standing donor countries is waning.
“The traditional Western donors who have been supporting global health since, effectively, the end of the Second World War are tired,” said the veteran epidemiologist, who also serves as Chair of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s (GPEI) Strategy Committee.
By contrast, he described the way Gulf countries are “owning problems within the region” and joining hands with long-standing institutions to ensure that the donor fatigue doesn’t come at the expense of much-needed vaccine doses.
“There are many countries within this region that are highly involved in this initiative. And that's a good thing. We need more countries like that.”
The Last Mile is the Longest
The $1.9 billion funding seeks to do three things at once: protect 370 million children with vaccines each year, narrow the $1.7 billion resource gap in the GPEI 2022-2029 budget to about $440 million, and sustain the speed of outbreak response by supporting health systems in places where immunity has slipped.
However, while funding grabs headlines, experience has taught those on the front lines that reaching zero will demand more than just funding pledges and optimism. The most “critical” lever of success, Dr Ahmed stressed, is political commitment from national and local authorities.
“We've done this work over many decades now in many countries. And almost all of them have succeeded, except a very few… Number one is government leadership and commitment.”
He pointed to Pakistan’s representation among pledging leaders as a signal of commitment he wants to see from countries still battling the virus, emphasising that local leadership must approach polio eradication as a task driven from within and not something funded by outsiders.
The second condition is simple to describe, the most important to achieve, and yet the hardest to accomplish: reaching every single child along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.
“It's all about vaccinating children. There are areas along the two countries where you have instability, insecurity, and inaccessibility. It's figuring out how to get to those children,” Dr Ahmed said, explaining that the persistent geopolitical instability is a key reason why the polio virus remains endemic there.
And outside conflict zones, the fight has picked up a newer, much less talked-about problem — vaccine hesitancy in countries that consider polio a closed chapter. The WHO polio chief said this scepticism often flourishes precisely because vaccination has pushed the disease so far out of sight, giving communities “the luxury to say they don’t want it” until outbreaks remind them otherwise.
“But the challenge is that the minute you step back, you see massive outbreaks. And no country is safe, by the way. We are so interconnected. There's not a single outbreak anywhere that can be contained within those borders. It will spread,” he warned.
That urgency is thrown into relief by what the latest numbers show when the world eases off. After historic lows in 2021 and 2023, wild polio has paralysed 39 children in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2025, while outbreaks of variant poliovirus have continued in 18 countries, according to GPEI’s latest data.
WHO modelling, meanwhile, indicates that losing momentum now could let the virus rebound and incapacitate up to 200,000 children each year, including in countries that have been polio-free for decades.
On the other hand, if current efforts hold and the eradication goal is met, polio would become only the second human disease ever eradicated after smallpox. GPEI estimates that this would save the world more than $33 billion by 2100 in avoided treatment costs and emergency response, making it not only a public health milestone but an economic one, too.
In that sense, Dr Ahmed framed the last mile as a shared risk as much as a shared ambition, because the world has already learned what happens when attention drifts.
“We are all in this together,” he said.
“We sink or swim together.”
