From MotherJones: Instead of vaccines, other countries got pseudoscience.
by a Kenyan user that was made to look like a news article made the rounds in Kenya, announcing: “Abortion drugs discovered in Bill Gates’ vaccines. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been accused of secretly sterilizing millions of women in Africa by doctors in Kenya after abortion drugs were discovered in tetanus [vaccines].
Now, in Kenya and other parts of the developing world, public health experts worry that anti-vaccine activists will leverage fear and uncertainty around COVID vaccines to undermine long-standing and highly effective vaccination programs in the developing world. There are signs of this happening already, even as global nonprofits are fighting the disinformation at its source.
of a “perfect storm” of conditions for a measles outbreak, noting that in many countries an uptick in cases had already begun.In Kenya, vaccine denial and rejection also fosters a dangerous economy of charlatans “selling health misinformation,” says Mugendi of Meedan. The Kenyan health system is biased toward the rich. Those who can afford good treatment buy it. Those who can’t take shortcuts.
Disinformation thrives even in rural places with limited access to social media. Hayi Hassan, 62, and Hussein Ali, 75, are Somali animal herders living in northeast Kenya who didn’t get the vaccine because they’d heard it could cause blood clots or death. “I was told that when you’re injected, exactly after four months you will die,” Ali says. Neither of them believes COVID is serious. “I haven’t seen any people dying in Garissa town, so I’m probably safe,” Ali says.
The very ubiquity of these rumors makes combating them a challenge. Yet some fact-checking agencies report that they have made modest progress. On a recent day, the Vaccine Demand Observatory’s tool reviewing social media posts included one on false claims about COVID vaccines for children in Vietnam, another about rumors about vaccine dangers promoted by Bangladeshi politicians, and another on disinformation about the safety of COVID vaccines for older adults in East Timor.
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