Catholic Bishops In Kenya Call For A Boycott Of Polio Vaccines

[cleanhippie]

Africa will mark one year without polio on Tuesday. The last case was in Somalia in 2014.

But last week, a polio vaccination campaign in Kenya faced an unlikely opponent: The country's Conference of Catholic Bishops declared a boycott of the World Health Organization's vaccination campaign, saying they needed to "test" whether ingredients contain a derivative of estrogen. Dr. Wahome Ngare of the Kenyan Catholic Doctor's Association alleged that the presence of the female hormone could sterilize children.

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/08/09/430347033/catholic-bishops-in-kenya-call-for-a-boycott-of-polio-vaccines

FFS, what more do the catholic laity need to see how backwards and harmful the RCC really is?

DU Catholics: why do you continue to support this terrible organization with your time and money?

[niyad]

1. you mean this isn't from the Onion???

[cleanhippie]

8. Sadly, no. And neither are the deflections from our resident apologists.

See downthread for examples.

[niyad]

2. has pope phot op made any comments about this?

[rug]

3. I will never set foot in a Catholic Church in Kenya!

[Angry Dragon]

17. that is too bad

[Warren Stupidity]

19. Or attend a service by a bishop calling for the killing of gays.

Or a service in any of the diocese involved in covering up pederasty.

Oh wait. Never mind the last one.

[dflprincess]

4. Hopefully the pope will step in and slap them around

He's smart enough not to put up with this sort of nonsense.

[catrose]

7. Yeah, he knows this science stuff n/t

[cleanhippie]

10. Just like he did with the pedophile priests and their enablers?

I wouldn't hold your breath.

[beam me up scottie]

11. He knows about their campaign against vaccines in Africa.

So far he hasn't said a word about it.

I think that tells you everything you need to know about what's important to the pope.

[SheilaT]

5. I wonder just how much basic chemistry

that doctor learned if he thinks *if* there is estrogen in the vaccine, its presence could sterilize anyone. That's a rather breath-taking amount of ignorance on display.

[Mona]

6. Appears to be a consequence of earlier findings...

...From their tetanus vaccines...
http://www.onenewsnow.com/culture/2014/11/16/kenyan-doctors-un-sterilized-1m-females-via-tetanus-vaccine-13m-to-go

Edit: I should say that I don't knoww anything about the source I linked to, it was just the first one that would open on my phone. I just remember this story when it broke months ago, though I don't know any details.

[Act_of_Reparation]

15. The story is bogus.

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/fear-mongering-about-vaccines-as-racist-population-control-in-kenya/

None of these charges are new. This is a conspiracy theory that’s been around at least since the 1990s and appeared in nations such as Mexico, Tanzania, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. No evidence of mass-sterilization was ever found, but these rumors did adversely impact vaccination programs in those countries.

But lack of evidence has never been much of an obstacle for people desperate to believe something.

[Warpy]

9. OK, Pope's gonna have to cut his vacation short to recall them to Rome

and have a little chat with them. While this Pope shares his predecessors' archaic and damaging view of women, he does acknowledge the existence of microbes and viruses.

He also needs to check out the career path in the African church.

[Warren Stupidity]

13. Rome looks to Africa as its future.

It is very unlikely the Vatican will do much of anything to corral the African bishops.

[beam me up scottie]

12. Catholic doctors and priests versus the tetanus vaccine in Kenya

Catholic doctors and priests versus the tetanus vaccine in Kenya
Posted by Orac on November 13, 2014

Of the many lies and myths about vaccines that stubbornly persist despite all evidence showing them not only to be untrue but to be risibly, pseudoscientifically untrue, among whose number are myths that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, and a syndrome that so resembles shaken baby syndrome (more correctly called abusive head trauma) that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis for vaccine injury, the lie that vaccines are being used for population control is one of the most persistent. In this myth, vaccines are not designed to protect the populations of impoverished nations against diseases like the measles, which still kills hundreds of thousands of people a year outside of developed countries. Oh, no. Rather, according to this myth, vaccines are in fact a surreptitious instrument of population control designed to render people sterile.

You might recall how a few years ago antivaccinationists leaped on a statement by Bill Gates that “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [population] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” They used it to accuse Gates of being a eugenicist and that vaccines were in actuality an instrument of global depopulation. It was a ridiculous charge of course. In context, it was clear that Gates was referring to how the expected population increase from 6.8 billion to 9 billion could be blunted with good health care; in other words, he was referring to how good health care could decrease the rate of population growth, not how vaccines could be used to depopulate the world. However, because of the prevalence of the myth that vaccines are sterilizing agents intended for global depopulation, the charge that Gates is a eugenicist, as batshit nuts as it obviously is to reasonable people, resonated in the anti-science world of antivaccinationists. Similar claims, namely that there is “something” in vaccines that results in infertility and sterilization, have been unfortunately very effective in frightening people in Third World countries and have played a major role in antivaccine campaigns that have delayed the eradication of polio.

...

Lest you think that this obsession over vaccination as a cause of infertility is limited to Kenya and other Third World countries, consider this. The very same theme frequently appears in antivaccine rants against Gardasil, which has been blamed without evidence for premature ovarian failure. Another favorite antivaccine trope is that polysorbate-80, which is used in some vaccines, causes infertility. Yes, we in the “advanced” First World nations are as prone to falling for these lies as Kenyans. Never forget that.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/11/13/catholic-doctors-and-priests-versus-the-tetanus-vaccine-in-kenya/

I see they've moved on to Polio vaccines now, that's just fucking great.

DU Catholics: why do you continue to support this terrible organization with your time and money?

Any Catholic who shrugs this off should realize what that says about them.

Unlike the poster above who thinks this is funny, I'm sure many other Catholics care more about the people who will suffer because of this campaign against vaccinations than the image of the Church.

Fuck the RCC.

[Warren Stupidity]

18. just got around to reading this. Holy shit.

[mr blur]

14. Astonishing and depressing that some here find something amusing about this situation.

Though, I guess, not surprising.

[Igel]

16. Not amusing.

But I rather thought this was mostly a Muslim problem, but that's probably because of a non-random sample on my part. I wonder if it started among Xians and was picked up by dolts in Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Philippines and Kenya or if it started among Muslims and was picked up elsewhere.

Notice that in some of these locations there's a strong Muslim minority in a Xian majority, or a Xian minority with a Muslim minority. That implies a lot of contact between two faiths with different levels of institutional prestige, which allows the ideas from the dominant faith to spread into the minority community.