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In October 2014, a group of concerned Catholic bishops in Kenya released a statement claiming a tetanus vaccine program aimed at women entering or in their childbearing years was in actuality a stealth attempt to sterilize women en masse for unstated reasons. Among questions raised by the group in its statement about the tetanus vaccine campaign in Kenya were why the vaccines were considered necessary if no tetanus crisis in Kenya had been declared, why the vaccine was offered primarily to women between the ages of 14 and 49, why boys and men were not targeted by the campaign, and why tetanus was prioritized over other illnesses affecting citizens of Kenya: A Catholic doctors' group in Kenya echoed the concerns of the bishops, and an anti-abortion site quoted Dr. Muhame Ngare of the Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi as saying: Dr. Collins Tabu, the head of immunization at Kenya's Health Ministry, refuted the claim and said women immunized under the program in recent years subsequently conceived, prompting Dr. Ngare to respond with: Dr. Ngare's forced choice between the doctors or the Kenyan government neglects a third possibility: someone, somewhere is sincere but mistaken. His statement about the timing of vaccinations in respect to the earliest age women can marry in Kenya is a good illustration of fallacious thinking — since the vaccine is given in a five-shot series, beginning administration three years prior to marrying age makes more sense than exposing women who are married but not yet immunized to losing children to tetanus. The expressed concerns of Ngare and bishops in Kenya are the same as false rumors circulated over two decades ago in several other countries (Mexico, Tanzania, Nicaragua, and the Philippines) where the WHO and UNICEF undertook tetanus vaccination programs: These rumors (and similar ones concerning polio vaccination programs) have several aspects, one being the focus on women of childbearing age in Kenya. Neonatal tetanus resulted in the deaths of 550 Kenyan babies in 2013, and according to UNICEF, 58,000 babies worldwide died of neonatal tetanus in 2010 (a count that includes only known tetanus deaths). The organization explained the necessity of tetanus immunization in countries such as Kenya, and how the scope of the problem could be even larger than has been recorded to date: That information was echoed in an interview with James Elder, UNICEF's Chief of Communications for East Africa, by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam): Another aspect of the debate concerns contraceptive vaccines, a medical initiative that has long been in the testing phase. However, the Catholic bishops in Kenya are not claiming that Kenyan women are being given the equivalent of a contraceptive vaccine (something which in current form would have to be readministered every few months to be effective), but rather are being sterilized through the injection of a substance (b-HCG) that renders them permanently infertile. The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association claimed they had tested samples of the tetanus vaccine used in Kenya and found them to be laced with (b-HCG) (a component of experimental birth control vaccines), but UNICEF noted that there was no laboratory in Kenya capable of making an accurate analysis of that nature: Again, this aspect of the claim perfectly mirrors similar rumors spread decades earlier during the course of tetanus vaccination programs in several other countries: The conspiracy theory that Kenya’s tetanus vaccination program is actually aimed at sterilization, not vaccination, has had staying power long after the original controversy passed. This is, in part, thanks to one of the companies tasked to perform analyses by the Catholic Doctors Association losing their laboratory accreditation years after the fact. In December 2016, a company that had been involved in efforts to test the tetanus vaccine — Agriq-Quest — was audited by both the Kenya Accreditation Service (KENAS) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). That audit resulted in Agri-Quest losing its laboratory accreditation. A former employee who resigned from Agriq-Quest told Business Daily Africa in January 2017 that the lab had been claiming to perform analyses they were not capable of performing: Agriq-Quest, however, claimed through an attorney that their loss of accreditation came as a result of more nefarious reasons — the government hadn’t paid them for analyses they performed on behalf of the Ministry of Health and The Catholic Doctors Association because the Ministry wanted them to doctor their results: While no evidence has been offered to suggest that narrative was anything other than a desperate PR move by a business whose accreditation had been revoked, the claim of a government's mandating doctored results to sell a secret sterilization program has not been ignored by conspiracy minded websites such as Your News Wire, which continued to promote Agriq-Quest’s claims as recently as February 2018. Despite such claims, no compelling evidence exists that the tetanus vaccination program in Kenya has been in any way animated by a desire to sterilize Kenyan women. Such claims have their roots in laboratory testing widely considered to have been flawed in method.
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