“A rare bright spot amid the disastrous conflict in the Gaza Strip.”
That is how UNICEF described the successful first phase of a massive polio vaccination campaign in Gaza. Polio was confirmed three weeks ago, and over the last several days, UNICEF, the WHO, and UNRWA have taken advantage of humanitarian pauses in the fighting to administer hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses. In the first segment of this To Save Us From Hell podcast episode, Mark Leon Goldberg and Anjali Dayal discuss how this vaccination campaign is being carried out and why it has been successful so far even as other humanitarian interventions have faltered. What makes this polio vaccination campaign so different from other attempts at getting food and medicine into Gaza at scale?
Next, we examine a new piece in Foreign Affairs by UN Peacekeeping Chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix, which laments the lack of peace-making efforts in the world today. Lastly, Anjali interviews Kayla Redstone from the Universal Postal Union, a little-known but hugely important UN agency that enables people to send mail and parcels virtually anywhere in the world. It’s mundane multilateralism—and it works!
The full podcast episode is freely available here.