More than two million women and girls are yet to know whether they have been sterilised, 10 months since the Catholic Church warned they had been exposed to a contaminated tetanus vaccine.
This, psychologists say, creates extreme anxiety for any woman or girl who received the vaccine and would have wanted to have a child since then or in future.
Health Cabinet Secretary James Macharia said he expected to get test results from the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) Monday.
"I am away from office but will be back on Monday (Monday). The results from the Kenyan lab will be presented to me on Monday (Monday) but will let you know when results from Germany are to be expected," he said.
Mr Macharia had promised to announce the results in the first week of December.
But sources close to the test issues say the vaccine was found to be safe, and the delay in releasing results is more political than technical.
Director of Medical Services Nicholas Muraguri said once results are received, the two groups will sit together and decide how they are to be disseminated to the public.
Anti-fertility agent
"We will tell you as soon as we have the results and put the information out in a manner that is most sensitive to all those who participated," Dr Muraguri told the Standard.
Surprisingly, Kenya Catholic doctors Stephen Karanja and Wahome Ngare of Mercy Medical Centre have not questioned the 'delayed' results, which are said to take between 24 to 48 hours to complete.
Dr Ngare told The Standard they are yet to receive the results.
In late November, two groups, the MaterCare International, an organisation of Catholic health professionals and the American Association of ProLife Obstetricians and Gynaecologists had given the vaccine a clean bill of health but absolved the Kenya bishops from any wrongdoing.
MaterCare said the bishops were 'acting in good faith on evidence presented to them'. Doctors from the two organisations reviewed the tests done by their colleagues in Kenya and were convinced the vaccines were clean.
"The validity of the tests done in Kenya is questionable, in some instances varying by a factor of 4,000 times between laboratories," said MaterCare in a statement.
Ahmed Kalebi of Lancet Laboratories, one of the facilities involved in the initial tests, said they told the Catholic doctors that the vaccine did not contain the alleged anti-fertility agent, and theirs were not the appropriate labs to do the required tests.
On whom and how to lay the blame in case a negative verdict is confirmed, which is the most likely outcome, is the big political dilemma facing Macharia.
The Cabinet Secretary may not want to be seen as being overenthusiastic in punishing or embarrassing a constituency that may be friendly to his employer.
The whole issue exploded one Monday morning in March when John Cardinal Njue was reported to have warned women against taking a Government driven tetanus vaccine, alleging that it contained anti-infertility agents.
The vaccination campaign targeted 2.3 million women and girls aged between 14 and 49 in four phases carried out in 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2014.
"We managed to reach more than 70 per cent of our target, which was very commendable," said Macharia.
The Cardinal's allegations were followed by spirited denials from the Government, Unicef and the World Health Organisation (WHO) but civil society groups fighting for women rights remained mum.
Matters heated up in October when the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association presented what it said was scientific evidence from six local laboratories proving their claims.
However, at the end of November, the two sides agreed to do joint tests at the Kemri, UK and South African laboratories.
In the first week of December, Macharia said the samples were collected from several counties and sent to South Africa and UK for testing and results would have been made public before the end of that week.
In November, a top WHO official said the vaccine was not contaminated with a human hormone used to sterilise women.
WHO Reproductive Health and Research Director Marleen Temmerman said the vaccine did not contain the beta human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone said to sterilise women.
"This issue has blown up in Kenya and it is a good decision to have it brought to the fore," said Prof Temmerman.
Blood sample
She called for continuation of the immunisation programme as authorities verify whether or not the human hormone is present in the vaccine.
This came after WHO and Unicef issued a statement saying they were deeply concerned about the "misinformation circulating in the media" about the tetanus toxoid vaccine.
The two said the allegations against the vaccine were capable of undermining the national immunisation programmes for children and women.
"We have taken note of the test results claiming to show levels of hCG in samples submitted to some clinical laboratories. However, it is important to note that testing for content of medicine... needs to be done in a suitable laboratory, and from a sample of actual medicine or vaccine obtained from an unopened pack and not a blood sample," the statement read in part. They said over 130 million women in 52 countries had received over two doses of the vaccine.