My first experience with vaccines was in a Catholic school. We hid in the bush the entire day because someone spread a rumour that health workers were coming to vaccinate us against measles, or maybe kwashiorkor, I cannot remember.
All I remember is hiding inside some bush the entire day. Why, you ask? Because we had been fed fear and lies. Fear that the vaccines were going to paralyse or even kill us.
We believed all the lies. Where was the media then? Somewhere in Nairobi, so far away. No one was there to tell us the truth.
Years later, I was involved in yet another propaganda campaign, this time targeting the tuberculosis vaccine, and how it was being used to sterilise women.
Where was the media then? Nowhere to be seen.
The truth is that the media owes Kenyans an apology for sitting on the fence as all manner of propaganda and fake news is spread around by every Dick, Tom and Harry.
Take the latest propaganda against Covid 19 vaccine, for example. Chances are that there are some in our newsrooms who believe, and are actively spreading the rumours, that the jab is not safe.
And if we believe rumours, what happens to Wanjiku out there? Unfortunately, the biggest propagator of the conspiracy theories has been the church.
But why do we give some characters a chance to use the media to spread lies?
Archbishop Philip Anyolo, chair the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, told off some fellows purporting to be experts on the vaccine. Archbishop Anthony Muheria of Nyeri was among the first church leaders to dismiss the Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theories.
But still, we, the media, rush to interview quacks and let them feed the public with trash.
When will we ever learn that our job is not to report what every Dick, Tom and Harry says without questioning them, without putting them to task to explain, justify, give the evidence?
Is it too difficult to interview top brains in this country who can tell us, in plain language, whether the Covid-19 vaccine is safe for all of us?
Why do we go interviewing characters whose only qualification is that they like the sound of their voice?
If some old mother or father out there dies of Covid-19 because, believing all the rumours and gossip, they refused to take the jab, we, the media, will have blood in our hands.
