A Cure for Poverty

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Despite the excellent track record of vaccines in some quarters, they are still treated with considerable suspicion. How can—and should—these doubters be convinced? We show this: polio—in Tajikistan we filmed a father who refused to let his daughter be vaccinated because he thought it was a secret method of birth control. There have also been riots against polio vaccination campaigns and strong resistance to other vaccines like HPV (for example, immunizing Catholic girls against a sexually transmitted disease). HPV is also important in terms of the trend for preventative vaccines; it’s harder to harness the immune system to make a therapeutic vaccine, but scientists have been successful in trials currently taking place for vaccines targeting melanoma, kidney, lung and breast cancers and Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What is this the future of vaccines?