After helping report on a strange case of polio in Gaza last year, Maria Cheng started trying to uncover why this case happened at all.
Over months, she spoke to many polio officials who shared concerns over the direction of the program, but nobody would go on the record for fear of losing funding. The breakthrough came from staffers who had worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan and shared internal reports from the last decade, showing falsified records and poorly trained vaccinators — issues that had been dismissed for years. Others revealed emails circulated among senior WHO staff discussing critical problems with the oral polio vaccine.
She then teamed with Riazat Butt, who spoke with health workers in Pakistan under high pressure, including those immunizing children and traveling within war-torn areas. The story was told with powerful images by Shafiullah Kakar (Afghanistan) and Fareed Khan (Pakistan), and video by Hidayatullah Shah (Afghanistan), Muhammad Farooq (Pakistan) and Mary Conlon (New York).
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