A number of Facebook posts showing images of organisms cautions the audience saying, “Don’t be Vaccinated! the vaccines contain bacteria.” We can assume here that the subject of the post is the Covid-19 vaccine, since the current controversial vaccine in Ethiopia is the Covid-19 vaccine.
However, none of these claims are true.
Covid-19 was declared as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization (WHO).
On March 13, 2020, Ethiopia’s Health Minister Lia Tadesse confirmed the country’s first case of coronavirus. A 48-year-old Japanese national who had entered the country after visiting Burkina Faso has tested positive for the virus.
The vaccine administration began on March 13, 2021, prioritizing health care and frontline workers. The Ethiopian Ministry of Health announced on April 1 that people over the age of 65 and those aged between 55 to 64 with underlying health issues would start getting vaccinated starting from April 5. In Ethiopia, there have been 368,979 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 6,630 deaths, reported to WHO until November 16, 2021. As of 14 November 2021, a total of 5,066,481 vaccine doses have been administered.
However, Haqcheck inspected the images by reverse image search in order to ratify the claims. The photos in the Facebook posts are not images taken from vaccine samples. They appear to be taken from an article on the Tuberculosis Foundation Website, entitled “What is Tuberculosis?”.
Furthermore, in an effort to ratify the claim, we spoke to Meskerem, the Secretary of the National task force of vaccine issues, at the Ministry of Health. “The claims are totally false. There are no bacteria in the vaccine,” she explained.
Therefore, due to the aforementioned reasons, HaqCheck rated the statement as FALSE.
