Groups fighting around the region are using the vaccination rollout for their own ends, by blocking aid or distributing it to friends and allies only.

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.





COVID-19 vaccines as ′biological warfare′ in Middle East? | Middle East| News and analysis of events in the Arab world | DW | 05.02.2021