Cool and thanks for the extra info, I&#x27;ll check out those links.<p>You&#x27;re right that the story comes off as incredibly one-sided, and some of the claims did indeed leave me with a feeling of &quot;there&#x27;s gotta be another side to this&quot;. On the other hand, many of the claims by themselves weren&#x27;t <i>that</i> surprising either (of the type that makes people use the &quot;I don&#x27;t see why anyone is <i>surprised</i>&quot;-non-dismissal).<p>But I&#x27;m always interested to try and balance that view somewhat.<p>That said, even without having read your links, I can&#x27;t imagine any other interpretation of the events (as also corroborated by the US&#x27; PR themselves) that would <i>not</i> have caused the destruction of decades of building of trust in vaccination programs to the local populations. That part doesn&#x27;t just come from Hersh, the US admitted as much themselves--well not the repercussions obviously, but that they did (ab)use the vaccination programs as cover for a conspiracy furthering US military interests.<p>As anyone remotely familiar with the difficulties for vaccination programs should know, <i>that alone</i>, well-substantiated rumours, are more than enough to ruin a local vaccination program entirely. I mean, obviously, the act of administering a vaccine to a person is not the hard part of these programs. It&#x27;s the part to get them voluntarily <i>choose</i> to receive the vaccines.<p>Regardless of all the other bold claims and conspiracy surrounding the OBL operation, the US should have reconsidered thrice before involving the vaccination programs. The scales should have been <i>abundantly</i> clear:<p>One the one hand there&#x27;s the possibility of a monumental achievement for the whole of mankind, the complete eradication of a terrible disease, saving who-knows how many lives, something that can without any reservations whatsoever be placed on the &quot;good&quot; side of just about anyone&#x27;s moral compass. Those were the stakes, and they knew it.<p>And on the other hand, there&#x27;s getting revenge on Osama Bin Laden, who didn&#x27;t play a serious role any more in the wars the US is waging. Already when he was killed, the only reasonable reaction I could (sort of) understand was &quot;yes of course it&#x27;s just for PR and ego reasons alone. but eh, let them have it, maybe it&#x27;ll provide some closure&quot;.<p>So yes, whoever made that call and went on with it, did it for extremely petty reasons. And yes it probably was not a single person that decided this, it was probably a rotten system stuck in a feedback loop of hate, like an ingrown toenail, that made it pretty hard for anyone involved <i>not</i> to go along with it. It&#x27;s still petty, and they can still own it.