A top White House official has assured the deans of prominent US public health schools that the CIA will no longer use vaccination programmes as cover for spying operations.
The agency used the ruse in targeting Osama bin laden before the US raid that killed him in 2011.lisa Monaco, President Barack Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser, wrote to the deans of 13 public health schools last week, saying that the CIA has agreed it would no longer use vaccination programmes or workers for intelligence purposes.
The agency also agreed to not use genetic materials from such programmes. A Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, provided polio vaccinations in Pakistan, as cover for his CIA-backed effort to obtain DNA samples from children at a compound where Bin laden was later killed during a 2011 raid.