Ahh—the old phony-vaccination ruse. How does the C.I.A. come up with this stuff? On Monday we learned, from a report in the Guardian, that our vaunted intelligence community decided to use a staged vaccination drive as a cover in its attempt to pin down the location of Osama bin Laden. (The idea seems to have been to get D.N.A. samples from the children in the Abbottabad compound while injecting them, to compare to that of bin Laden’s relatives.) Has anyone who works at the C.I.A. ever heard the following words: Elvis sightings, Area 51, Andrew Wakefield? Just for the record: Elvis is dead; no U.F.O. has ever been sighted in Area 51; and Andrew Wakefield, the pernicious quack who used doctored data to assert that vaccines cause autism, has mounted a gleeful and distressingly effective war on vaccines and the Age of Reason. Langley should have thought a bit more seriously about what it was doing, because vaccines, no matter how wondrous, already have enough stigma and suspicion attached to them. This will not help.

I guess the northern Nigerian desk in Langley wasn’t permitted to sit in on the planning of the Abbottabad vaccine hoax, or perhaps somebody might have mentioned that it has not been long since Nigerian mullahs campaigned against polio vaccinations—claiming they were a Western plot. The result was that people who were infected went to Mecca on the hajj and spread their disease to people from many countries. Today the world continues to struggle with a paralytic disease it should have vanquished.

I don’t mean to pick on the mullahs. We are at least as bad. More than a third of Americans refuse to take flu shots or get them for their children—despite the fact that forty thousand Americans die of the flu every year and virtually nobody dies of the flu shot. And I can’t wait to read what those who already believe in a conspiracy tying measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines to autism have to say about the fact that an American intelligence agency was acting with deception and an ulterior motive in promoting a mass inoculation campaign.

Before we go further, a position statement: I am one of those credulous, gullible Americans who believes that Barack Obama was telling the truth when he announced, on May 1st, that a Navy SEAL team had breached the Pakistani guest home of Osama bin Laden and killed him. I also believe that the President is an American citizen. More than that, I hold the increasingly contested opinion that vaccines are an absolute good—that programs to vaccinate children against infectious diseases are among the most effective public-health measures in the history of the world, particularly in developing countries, like Pakistan, where children still die every day from measles, not to mention other easily preventable diseases. But vaccines are doubted these days, along with just about everything else made or regulated by any government, corporation, or figure of authority. This is totally understandable as an instinct, but deplorable when that instinct kills children.

I am glad we got bin Laden. But doesn’t the C.I.A. have enough credibility problems? Was adding to the frenzied fear of conspiracy, not to mention the doubts people have about their leaders or the burdens of physicians who spend endless hours trying to convince reluctant parents to vaccinate their children, genuinely necessary here? Did anybody stop to wonder if this plan would put public-health workers in the world’s neediest countries at increased risk? I hate to question our leaders, of course, but I don’t think so.

Photograph: AFP Photo/Aamir Qureshi