Written by Art Harrington
Scheduled guest speaker Abe Feder had to postpone his visit and has been rescheduled for May 4th, 2022 to talk about the Rotary Microcredit programs.
In Abe's place, Art Harrington gave the update on the Polio Eradication End Game. He shared Carol Pandak's presentation on the organizational and statistical aspects of Rotary's longstanding battle to eradicate polio.
It showed a top-level explanation of how it all works, including the immense organization, the relationships with the CDC, the World Health Organizations, the many countries' governments and the Gates Foundation, which it has taken to bring us almost to the finish line.
This has been no small, brief or inexpensive commitment which Rotary made, and to which we have remained committed to finishing. Rotarians alone have personally invested more than a billion dollars in this gigantic venture.
Not only did everyone, including the CDC and WHO, believe it to be an impossible task when we proposed in 1985 the goal of worldwide polio eradication, the fact is that no other organization in the world would have had the respect, the clout, the resources or the stick-to-itiveness to have ever provided the necessary vision and leadership to make it happen.
When it is finally finished, and our task has been accomplished, hopefully the world will recognize at that point that it was Rotary which has led all the way in accomplishing "the impossible." I was not sure I would ever live long enough to see us cross the finish line; but now that we are so close to the end, I may actually see it happen.
The presentation also featured Pakistan Rotaract club president, Mashiem Salman Mooberak's interview of the 8-year courageous veteran front-line door-to-door inoculator of the children. It is sobering to realize that more than 100 of these dedicated women have been killed in the process of bringing our war against polio so close to being won. Their courage and commitment to the task has been awe-inspiring!
I am so proud of all that Rotary does accomplish, year-after-year, in our communities and around the world; but our global leadership in Polio Eradication has made me most proud.
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