A bishop in Nakuru now says the Catholic Church will not be involved in the ongoing measles campaign which concludes on Tuesday, saying the government has refused to furnish the church with information regarding the exercise.
Catholic Diocese of Nakuru Bishop Maurice Muhatia said efforts by the Catholic Church to get information regarding the vaccinations have not borne fruit and so will not be involved in the campaigns.
‘"They have not even bothered to give us sufficient information about the vaccination that is going on and yet, they want me, the Bishop of Nakuru to open the doors of the facilities of the diocese of Nakuru to help in the promotion of the measles vaccination campaign. I have said no thank you. I am not going to open the facilities of the diocese of Nakuru to help you in your campaign because you have stubbornly refused to give us information about what is going on as we agreed when we discovered there was something very wrong with the tetanus vaccination. What we are against is the secrecy that is involved in vaccination in this country,’ said the Bishop on Sunday at Holy Trinity Milimani Parish.
He, however, clarified that the church is not against children being vaccinated, adding that the Catholic Church is the single largest provider of health care in the world, with several hospitals under its management.
"About the ongoing vaccination, there is misleading information going around about the Catholic Church. One of them is that we are against the campaign. That is not true. The Catholic Church has never been against the well-being of society because apart from governments, the Catholic Church is the single largest provider of health care in the whole world. An institution that is the single largest provider of health care cannot be against the health of the society,’ added the Bishop.
The cleric, however, said the Catholic Church is concerned about some of the vaccination campaigns that have been held in Kenya for the last four years which include the tetanus and polio vaccines.
According to the bishop, the Church found out that the tetanus vaccines used in the national campaigns some time back were not safe, and that to date, the government has not come clean over the issue.
"There are things as Catholic Church we will never agree with. There has been a wave of vaccinations for about the last four years. First it was tetanus, and then there was polio, now there is measles. About Tetanus, we were concerned when we were told by some of our own Catholics from the Medical field that something was not right. We took the samples of the tetanus vaccine to laboratories both in Kenya and outside Kenya and the results were horrendous. We gave the findings to the Ministry of Health. Up to now they have not explained why the vaccines they were giving to people were poisoned," he added.