Vatican Radio last week charged that United Nations organizations promoting population control are using vaccines to surreptitiously sterilize women in Third World countries. Kenya’s Ministry of Health, along with the UN organizations — World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF — deny the charges, which carry the full weight of the Vatican. Vatican Radio is the official “voice of the Pope and the Church in dialogue with the World.”
“Catholic Bishops in Kenya have been opposed to the nationwide Tetanus Vaccination Campaign targeting 2.3 million Kenyan women and girls of reproductive age between 15-49 years, terming the campaign a secret government plan to sterilize women and control population growth,” reported Vatican Radio, as it took the occasion of the ordination of a Kenyan Bishop, Joseph Obanyi Sagwe, as an opportunity to remind the world of its concern.
The church, which operates 30% of Kenya’s health care facilities and has been providing health care in Kenya for more than 100 years, is not opposed to vaccinations. To the contrary, its health facilities have long been administering vaccines as part of its public health mission.
But the church and official organizations such as the Catholic Health Commission of Kenya and the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association assert that a tetanus vaccine program sponsored by WHO and UNICEF has been laced with HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone that the human embryo produces after conception to enable it to be implanted in the womb (HCG is also the chemical tested for in pregnancy tests). When the body receives HCG via a tetanus vaccine, it acts as an antigen, stimulating the production of antibodies to HCG. Those antibodies cause the woman’s body to reject future embryos, effectively sterilizing her.