Yemeni children are sick projects due to the absence of vaccines

For the fourth year in a row, the Houthi group has deprived millions of children in areas under its control of receiving vaccine doses against diseases, which its leaders describe as a “Zionist-American conspiracy.”

Last year, the Houthi health authorities organized a symposium titled “The Danger of Vaccines to Humanity – They Are Not Safe and Ineffective,” attended by the prime minister of the Sana’a government and the minister of health, in which they denounced vaccines and all modern medicine, and claimed that “Yemenis cannot obtain immunity from diseases and maintain their health except by following the instructions of the group’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.” It was noteworthy that the internal medicine specialist and assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Sana’a University, Abdul-Aziz al-Dailami, publicly apologized to everyone because he had once been the head of the vaccine committee.

Perhaps the Houthis’ incitement against and ban on children’s vaccinations in areas under their control was one of the reasons for the death of a 5-year-old girl named Nada in a hospital in Sana’a after she contracted measles. Nada’s father told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed: “I did not give my daughter any vaccinations against diseases because the Houthis said that vaccines are an American conspiracy targeting Yemen, and because there were no vaccines in the medical center near my house as well. Then my daughter fell ill and died before she reached the hospital.”

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), 41,000 children died in Yemen in 2022 from diseases that could be prevented by obtaining vaccines. It said at the time that a child died from these diseases every 13 minutes, while it recently warned in a report it issued entitled "Vaccines Save Children's Lives and Protect Yemen's Economy" that Yemen is witnessing a return of diseases that were thought to be a thing of the past, such as polio.

He stressed that "the areas controlled by the Houthis are threatened by the spread of diseases that can be prevented by taking vaccine doses, such as polio, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus. International organizations are keen to provide these vaccines, but the Houthi group prevents them in the areas under its control, which puts us in front of a real disaster revealed by the statistics coming from these areas about those infected with these diseases."

New Arab