The basic health unit of Bhangali, on the outskirts of Pakistan’s bustling Lahore, was packed with parents holding children. It was the monsoon season, but the anticipated downpour hadn’t broken, so the air was humid, and the people in the immunisation clinic’s anteroom were damp with sweat.

Following a thorough mapping phase, vaccinators were deployed to these harder-to-reach urban pockets with a simple, but ambitious, target: discover and protect all the under-immunised and unimmunised children that there were.

Twentieth n the queue, and expecting a wait of 45 minutes, Rubina Aslam, aged 28, held her 6-month-old daughter Sameena on her lap. To kill time, the young mother repeatedly read through the vaccination card in her hand, idly matching what she learned there against the vaccination schedule displayed on the wall.

Neither the unpleasant weather nor the delay had been able to dissuade her from the urgency of this visit, she told VaccinesWork. “Polio, hepatitis, measles, tetanus, diphtheria – these are all serious diseases and I would never want to contract them to Sameena, my daughter,” Aslam said.