Just when I think that I have run out of indignant, that I am fresh out of appalled, I come across a story like this: In an effort to determine the precise whereabouts of Osama bin Laden (preparatory to the extrajudicial killing, assassination, whatever you want to call it, of this monstrous person), the Central Intelligence Agency put together a fake hepatitis B vaccination clinic and went about collecting DNA in the Abbottabad, Pakistan neighborhood where bin Laden was suspected to be holed up. As the editors of Scientific American put it,
It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.
The likely wages of this shameful sin is the stalling of global efforts to eradicate polio, as Donald G. McNeil, Jr.’s reporting for the New York Times suggests. A certain Dr. Shakil Afridi is identified as being in charge of the fake medical exercise. Instead of administering the full three doses of vaccine that are called for in the protocol, the ersatz humanitarians abandoned the setup after giving one dose to everyone in an entire neighborhood, without permission. Bad medicine, reprehensible spycraft, irresponsible policy.