Catholic church objection to polio vaccine alarmist

The Catholic Church in Kenya has tried to assume the role of the Opposition in checking the government with such zeal one becomes suspicious of its motives. But the church is selective in the areas in which it wants to hold the government to account; the just concluded polio vaccination, for instance, being one such area.

Towards the end of last year, the Catholic Church raised objection to a government plan to administer tetanus jabs in selected areas of the country and to a specific group of people. Through a media advertisement in October 2014, the government urged women aged between 15 and 45 years to go for the tetanus vaccination. At the time, it seemed a curious thing to do since tetanus is not, like cervical cancer, a disease that afflicts women only. Everybody is at risk of contracting tetanus which perhaps is what raised the red flag.

Persistence by the Catholic Church compelled the Parliamentary committee on health to order independent investigations to ascertain the truth behind claims that the tetanus vaccination was laced with a birth control hormone. It later turned out the concerns of the church were purely alarmist; no trace of a birth control hormone could be traced in the samples taken for testing. But while the most logical thing for the Catholic Church to have done was let go; having been proved wrong, they recently raised similar concerns over the polio vaccination.

The administration of polio vaccine is not new to Kenya, which only makes objection by the Catholic Church suspect. Having lost its once firm unassailable grip on society, is the church trying to find relevance by simply making headlines and drawing attention to itself? I for one do not entirely trust those in authority because it is human to want to carry out certain activities that would immediately benefit them; like the 2014 security law amendments and now the proposal to make Kenya a quasi-military state through the Kenya Defence Force amendment bill 2015.

Nevertheless, I found the claim that the polio vaccine is laced with a birth control hormone ridiculous and pedestrian. I believe no government is stupid enough to sterilise a whole generation of millions of children under the age of five years. For crying out loud, the Nazi’s arguably went out with Hitler taking his miserable life rather than face capture on that fateful day in April 1945. There is no danger of anything akin to the holocaust here.

The Catholic Church has basis to support its claim, only wild conjecture. There is no authority bigger than the World Health Organisation and perhaps the United Nations Children Fund to give the polio vaccine a clean bill of health. What then forms the basis of the bishops’ unsupported claim? On a lighter note, catholic bishops don’t raise families and may not therefore appreciate the pain of raising disabled children. At best, they can only subject polio victims to prayer which, in any case, is of no help; barring miracles.

Picking on the Kenyan government to prove the efficacy of the vaccine even after the World Health Organisation had given the green light is symptomatic of ignorance by a people not versed in the intricate world of pharmacology. If the Catholic Church is really concerned about the welfare and reproductive vibrancy of Kenyans, taxing the government on this vaccine is barking up the wrong tree.

It behoves the church to take its war to the approved International pharmaceutical producers. Kenya is an end user; one among hundreds of governments that source the vaccines they administer locally from WHO approved suppliers.