The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) has declared a national public health emergency after WHO data revealed that Pakistan has 651,000 "zero-dose" children — infants who have not received even a first vaccine dose — making it responsible for 14 percent of all such cases across the WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region. The PMA warned that immunity gaps have breached the threshold needed for herd immunity, raising the risk of large-scale outbreaks of preventable diseases such as diphtheria and whooping cough, and attributed the crisis to governance failures, corruption, and administrative neglect rather than conflict — noting that the other top-affected countries in the region, including Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, are engulfed in active wars. The association called for urgent audits of provincial health and immunisation funds, the use of GPS-mapped data to locate and vaccinate missing children, and a formal declaration of routine immunisation as a national security priority.