Bruce Aylward has reason to lay awake at night. As Assistant Director-General of WHO, he is heading the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which, after 23 gruelling years and two failed attempts, is making another high-stakes swing at the eradication of polio. "There was a bit of a false premise going around about the consequences of failure", he tells The Lancet. "Many people had, for a long time, almost lied to themselves, saying that if eradication failed it wouldn't really matter, that we could just continue with cases at a very low level."
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