A boy receives polio vaccination in Somalia.
Photo Credit: Andrew W. McGalliard/Wikimedia Commons

In the years before U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, CIA handlers in Pakistan secretly hired a doctor to conduct a fake vaccination campaign. The intelligence agency told the doctor to conduct the program to obtain DNA from bin Laden’s children in order to confirm the al Qaeda leader was in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The information the doctor gathered was used in the ultimately successful effort to kill bin Laden in 2011.

Now, in the wake of years of criticism of that fake vaccination program, the U.S. is vowing to stop exploiting healthcare for intelligence operations. The White House has promised that the Central Intelligence Agency will no longer use vaccination campaigns as a front for conducting covert operations.  

But the damage has already been done. Polio, for instance, is on the rise around the world, including in Pakistan. Vaccinations have become tainted by their past association with the United States.

Last week, Obama administration counter-terrorism advisor Lisa Monaco sent a letter to the heads of 13 public health schools that announced a new CIA policy to spurn the use of vaccination campaigns in intelligence efforts. Monaco said that CIA director John Brennan had issued a directive saying that the agency would “make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers. Similarly, the agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs.”

Monaco’s letter came in response to concerns raised by the deans of public health universities. They charged that the CIA’s fake hepatitis vaccination program in Pakistan had severely undermined healthcare efforts in the country. Save the Children, a prominent NGO, had been run out the country because of the “CIA sham vaccination campaign” and “seven or more United Nations health workers who were vaccinating Pakistani children against polio were gunned down in unforgivable acts of terrorism,” the deans said in their letter. (Save the Children was accused of facilitating the CIA’s meetings with the doctor who ran the vaccination campaign, though they strongly deny this.)

In 2009, the CIA contacted Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani healthcare worker. He agreed to work for them while working at a hospital. Afridi set up a hepatitis B vaccination program in Pakistan. But it was actually a ruse. The end goal of the effort was to get inside the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad and take a DNA sample of one of bin Laden’s children to confirm that Osama bin Laden was actually in there. The effort continued as the Obama White House fiercely debated whether to launch a Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad—a risky ordeal they didn’t want to undertake if they weren’t confident bin Laden was in the Pakistani city.

It’s unclear whether Afridi ever did make it into the bin Laden house.