COVID-19 vaccines as ‘biological warfare’ in Middle East?

COVID-19 vaccines as ‘biological warfare’ in Middle East?

Aid and human rights organizations say they fear that the COVID-19 vaccine could become a tool for governments, rebel groups and other fighters involved in conflicts in the Middle East to advance their own goals.

Using vaccines this way "is a form of indirect, passive biological warfare,“ Annie Sparrow, a public health expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York, told DW.

It has happened before and it has been very deliberate, Sparrow said. Near the beginning of the Syrian civil war, in 2013, a disease the world had mostly eradicated broke out in Deir ez-Zour. The country officially eliminated polio in 1995. But medical researchers say that in 2012, Bashar al-Assad's government deliberately excluded the area, controlled by fighters who oppose it, from earlier routine vaccination drives. "This was a man-made outbreak,“ Sparrow wrote at the time.

Today there are fears the same sort of thing might happen with COVID-19 vaccines.

The politics of vaccination

"We have significant concerns for several reasons,“ Sara Kayyali, a Syria expert at Human Rights Watch, said. Her organization is worried about the destruction of infrastructure in Syria, everything from the deliberate targeting of hospitals and medical workers to lack of water or power. Human Rights Watch is also concerned about