“We Can't Give Up Now”: Global Health Optimism and Polio Eradication in Pakistan
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Polio Eradication Initiative, the largest coordinated public health project in history, is currently facing serious difficulties. For years, it has tried and failed to eliminate polio from its last strongholds in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Drawing on document analysis as well as participant observation and interviews in Pakistan, Atlanta, Geneva, and Montreal, I explore how officials in the Polio Eradication Initiative systematically devalued or quieted evidence that eradication was not achievable and emphasized evidence that it was achievable, thus creating a string of optimistic projections. Polio eradication's culture of optimism ensures the continuation of the project by convincing donors and officials alike that eradication is immanent. At the same time, it prevents open, objective analysis of the problems the project faces.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it