Vendettas trump the need to give someone a legal defense and have unintended consequences that its contagious ignorance endangers an entire population's health.
A former lawyer for the Pakistani doctor who helped the US find Osama Bin Laden has been killed by gunmen in the north-western city of Peshawar.
Samiullah Afridi was on his way home on Tuesday when unidentified assailants fired at his car. He later died.
In 2013 he fled Pakistan following threats by militants. After returning last year he told the BBC that he had stopped working on the doctor's case.
At least two Taliban splinter groups have claimed the killing.
Dr Shakil Afridi, who is no relation to Samiullah, is appealing against a 33-year sentence after being found guilty of collaborating with the Lashkar-e-Islam militant group in his native Khyber tribal region.
But many saw his sentence as punishment for aiding the CIA in their hunt for Bin Laden.
Bigelow's mistake in Zero Dark Thirty isn't the torture; it's giving ammunition to polio vaccine conspiracy theorists
Perhaps the most dangerous error, however, is a brief scene showing how a doctor was used by the CIA in an (unsuccessful) attempt to extract blood – and thus DNA – from children living in the mysterious house in Abbottabad. Shakil Afridi remains in prison for his work and the episode continues to cast a dark, dark shadow over immunisation programmes. The ruse has put health workers under suspicion of being Western agents with deadly results.
The truth is dangerous enough. But Zero Dark Thirty risks making a difficult situation worse with a clumsy mistake. The real-life Dr Afridi used the cover of a hepatitis vaccination programme, but in the movie his team wear jackets suggesting they are providing polio drops.
In a country where polio has made a comeback in recent years, the film provides yet another blow for health workers trying to eradicate the disease and prevent Pakistan acting as a reservoir to reinfect the rest of the world. If you think I'm scaremongering or I'm soft on Pakistan, blaming the CIA for its domestic ills, read this interview in one of the local papers, describing how a father crippled by polio allowed his son to be infected – apparently the first case in Karachi for more than a year…
“We came to know about Dr Shakil Afridi’s alliance with the Americans,” said the father, referring to the doctor’s alleged fake immunisation campaign which led to the capture of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“We thought that the polio campaign was being run by the Jews and Americans, so I wouldn’t let anyone give drops to my child,” said the crippled man, with face lines that showed just how deep and unforgiving his regret was.
It's a small world
It’s rare for Americans to reject every single recommended childhood vaccine. According to one 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, just two percent of the population refuses vaccines altogether.
Nonetheless, anti-vaccine beliefs are still finding a way to take hold. A large portion of vaccine skeptical parents are opting to delay vaccines, spacing out their kids’ shots based on the misguided belief that it’s harmful for children to get too many shots at once. That can leave their children unprotected for longer than they would have been otherwise — potentially exposing them to diseases like measles, even if their parents are planning on eventually giving them the MMR shot.