In as little as a month, Ukraine could become the only country in the world without protection from polio due to delays in licensing a new vaccine. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that healthcare workers in the European country will be unable to continue administering an older version of the vaccine beginning next month once the batches have expired. Led by the WHO, the global polio eradication initiative is a worldwide switch from trivalent polio vaccines to biovalent vaccines. However, Ukraine is the only country out of 155 in the world that hasn’t prepared for the switch. According to reports, Sanofi Pasteur, the manufacturer of the vaccine, applied for a license in February to supply Ukraine with the new vaccine, but received resistance from the country. In recent months, there’s been a push by healthcare lobby groups to resist complying with the initiative after two children were paralyzed by the illness during a rare vaccine-derived outbreak. Ukraine’s health ministry says that the main reason for the delay in licensing is due to the lobbyists’ anti-vaccination campaign, and that pushing the paperwork through will be “an uphill struggle.”

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