from - Combatting Antivaccination Rumours: Lessons Learned from Case Studies in East Africa

(Excerpted, with permission, from the unpublished report, "Deadly diseases, deadly vaccines, or deadly rumours?" by L. Luwaga, R. Wellington, and J. Clements)

In the spring of 1995, an international "pro-life" organisation spread rumours that the tetanus toxoid vaccine (TT) was being administered to women of childbearing age by immunisation programmes in developing countries and that a contraceptive hormone was included in the vaccine. In a press release circulated via the Internet to its affiliates in more than 60 countries, the organisation said tests of TT carried out in Mexico had shown it contained the pregnancy hormone, human chorion gonadotrophone (hCG). Tests in the Philippines performed by local hospital laboratories using pregnancy tests kits also reportedly showed the presence of hCG in TT. The organisation alluded to reports that "millions of women in Mexico and the Philippines have unknowingly received anti-fertility vaccinations under the guise of being inoculated against tetanus." It charged the WHO and UNCIEF of using these women as "uninformed, unwitting, non-consenting guinea pigs" in several countries with high population growth rates, notably Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania.

With support from WHO, six independent laboratories in five countries ran tests on TT from seven different manufacturers, including those supplying the four countries affected directly by the campaign. WHO issued a statement in 1995 to the effect that the rumours "are completely false and are totally without any scientific basis."

This is a classical example of "part-truth" in the rumour – a vaccine (TT) was being administered to childbearing-aged women, and it did test positive for hCG. Worse, Indian researchers reported a small trial of contraceptive vaccine using hCG coupled to tetanus toxoid to enhance immunogenicity in 1994. The reported presence of hCG in the Mexican and Philippiine tests of TT was clearly shown by subsequent tests to be below the limits of accuracy of the test kits using and was probably related to interference from the adjuvant and preservatives used in the vaccine. The findings of the Mexican and Philippine tests were called "an artifact rather than a true value" by Professor Salvatore Mancuso of the Vatican's Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. The subsequent tests conducted in several national control laboratories revealed no undeclared substances in the vaccine.

At the height of the rumours, TT immunisation suffered in all four countries. A Manila court injunction (subsequently lifted) banned the use of TT in immunisation campaigns in the Philippines. . . . The drop in vaccine coverage rates coinciding with these rumours in the Philippines is shown in Table 1.

* Incomplete reporting

Source: File of the Maternal and Child Health Services, Department of Health (1997). Manila, Philippines

To its credit, the Catholic Church has in some cases made efforts to combat the rumours spread by Profamilia. It was professor Salvatore Mancuso of the Vatican's Catholic University of the Sacred Heart hospital who said that the findings of the Mexican and Philippines tests were "an artifact rather than a true value" during the Tetanus toxoid controversy in the Philippines in 1995. (See the document at the Website).