But we got Bin Laden because of a fake vaccine program and I'm like 90% sure that was Polio too...
So it kind of makes sense. Hell, that was most likely a war crime when we did it. The reason it's not done is countries won't let vaccine initiatives happen if they think it's just military intelligence gathering.
If anything it's weird they were letting them happen to begin with.
Still concerned that it's fueling a lot of mistrust with the vaccination process though. One would hope that since it wasn't through UN/WHO then any UN/WHO programs would remain trusted, but who knows?
Actually, the fake vaccine initiative had several sources say it wasn't successful in proving OBL's final location.
By that point, they had found his suspicious compound anyway but needed some sort of confirmation that OBL was really there.
Regardless, now a substantial amount of people refuse to take vaccines after they learned the hep b drive was actually a CIA operation.
Which is really stupid because Pakistan was formerly the last country that still had polio cases and it took them another decade before they finally started to reduce it. iirc they were just recently surpassed by Gaza.
If they hadn't denied it, then I would have imagined that the Taliban was so disorganized that they just discovered this - or at least, just realized the potential implications (just connected the dots). That might still be the case, and the denial is simply a false one with the purpose to not worsen their reputation on the world stage.
It's interesting that, let me check my notes here... CIA created and State Department funded RFE/RFA/RL wouldn't mention this in the article isn't it....
They're just going to make their sex slaves have more kids and go back to the medieval population growth model. It's what they've always wanted anyways.
Generally speaking the propaganda networks are effective because they reliably report fact and then hide the spin or deliberately leave out context they're aware of.
For example, they might report this fact, and don't mention it's because the CIA has previously hidden agents in vaccination efforts, but it is technically "unbiased" reporting in that they're stating a fact. The Taliban is suspending vaccinations and didn't officially state a reason.
But you can generally trust the literal statement they're making, and they don't spend much time editorializing, thus "Least Biased."