🔴 Claim

Former presidential candidate and leader of the National Economic Empowerment Dialogue (NEED) party posted on X to say that the Ministry of Health had “brought another mRNA, this time for malaria, aimed at your children under one year.”

He said the “malaria vaccine is brought to you by GAVI, which means it has Bill Gates written all over it.” He also claimed that after three trials, there are still some nagging safety concerns and that scientist Peter Aaby from the University of Southern Denmark found that children who take this vaccine are 10 times more likely to get meningitis than those who do not.

Much of the protection the vaccine offers, he went on, wears out after 18 months. “Think twice before you put that stuff in your children’s body. Malaria is a curable disease; some of the side effects from this ‘vaccine’ might not be.”

🔴 Verdict

🔴 False

What we found

• The mRNA is a Covid-19 vaccine and has nothing to do with malaria. The malaria vaccine the Ministry of Health is using is called R21/Matrix-M. Another malaria vaccine, introduced before the R21/Matrix-M, is called RTS,S/AS01. It has been used in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi since 2019. The three countries have scaled up routine provision of the vaccine and have not reported any deaths or serious side effects.

• The Danish scientist Peter Aaby’s work about malaria vaccine risks appeared in The Lancet, a medical journal, in 2015 long before the two malaria vaccines were introduced. There is no published, peer-reviewed work about the serious side effects of R21/Matrix-M and RTS,S/AS01.

• The World Health Organisation, which approves vaccines, says: “Both R21/Matrix-M and RTS,S/AS01 vaccines are shown to be safe and effective in preventing malaria in children and are expected to have high public health impact.”

• R21/Matrix-M is not a product of Bill Gates, as Mr Kabuleta claims. Mr Gates’s foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he co-chairs, works with the Geneva-based Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the World Bank to increase equitable and sustainable use of vaccines.
• GAVI, or the Vaccine Alliance, is financed not only by the Gates Foundation but by governments and more than 60 corporations/companies around the world.

• Since its launch in 2000, GAVI has helped vaccinate more than 1.1 billion children in 78 low-income countries, preventing—NOT causing—more than 18.8 million future deaths.

🔴 Conclusion

There is no evidence to support the wild claims Mr Kabuleta made in his post, although it was shared 260 times. Some vaccines can cause side effects, just like prescribed drugs, but their benefits outweigh the risks. There is overwhelming evidence to support this.

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