How cow vaccines sparked conspiracy theories in Kenya
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Hello, I'm Hannah Gelbart and you're listening to What in the World from the BBC World Service. Today we're talking about Kenya, where a government push to vaccinate millions of cows has sparked a heated debate that spread way beyond the fields and pastures. The campaign began on Thursday, but in the months since it was announced, online conspiracy theories about vaccines have created widespread mistrust among farmers. Even the tech billionaire Bill Gates has had his name dragged into it.

So what's really going on here? And why are people in Kenya so sceptical about it? To help us get to the bottom of this, here in the studio with me is BBC journalist Peter Mwai from Nairobi, Kenya. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the programme. Thank you.

Why is there this push to get Kenya's livestock vaccinated? There have been several issues with the livestock. One is prevalence of some diseases that cause problems with livestock. The notorious one is foot-and-mouth disease. What the government is trying to do is to use vaccination as a way of controlling the diseases spreading and affecting the livestock. On the back of that, the government, in an attempt to improve the economy, they're trying to look for market for livestock produce.

And some of these markets are in the Middle East and in Europe. You need to meet some safety standards. And those ones you can't meet if your livestock are not vaccinated. Does that mean that these vaccinations are already rolled out in places like Europe, the Middle East, other parts of the world? Yes. And interestingly, they have been in use in Kenya for a long time. Oh, so long.

Nothing new? Yes. Only that in recent years, we haven't had the government going in a strong way in trying to make sure that every livestock is vaccinated. So why has there been this backlash? Part of it stems from what happened in mid last year. There were protests and there was very strong opposition to some taxation measures that the government wanted to introduce.

So that sort of flew over into people now opposing anything that comes from the government because they believe the government doesn't have their interests at heart. Somehow, this conspiracy started spreading that the government had received money from one of the billionaires, Bill Gates, and that the aim of the vaccination was actually to stop cows from passing gas, belching and so on.

And farting. We can say farting. And farting, yes. Just to be clear, the Kenya government says that Bill Gates has absolutely nothing to do with this vaccination campaign. Yes. And it grew slowly, started spreading. Then at the peak of it, in mid-November, we had the former vice president holding a press conference. He's called Kalonzo Musioka. He announced what he called a Sinstar foreign agenda that was being carried out by the government through this vaccination campaign.

Although he didn't specifically mention Bill Gates, of course, people knew that that was what he was talking about. He warned people to make sure that they reject this vaccination because he argued without any evidence that it was up to control methane emissions. And then that it would genetically modify livestock so that the cows and goats would start giving birth to offsprings that are deformed. And then over time, those deformations and problems would subside.

fight their way into humans. And he contextualized it in this hypothetical way that the whole aim is to make sure that the traditional livestock farming as we know it goes extinct so that the people behind the foreign agenda create a market for synthetic meat, artificial meat, which is made in the lab. So in that context, you wouldn't need any farmers at all. So that, of course, is a very scary message when you pass it to livestock farmers.

Within a few days after that press conference, people started voicing opposition to this plan to vaccinate livestock. You had people coming up with caricatures and cartoons saying the cows have their right to fart. Others going to their livestock pens and recording videos with their calves and cows and saying no one is going to touch you. Bill Gates is not going to touch you. Others were going on social media.

to voice opposition. We noticed there was a very huge spike of posts on X that were mentioning Cowes and Bill Gates in the month of November and October. But as you say, these are completely unfounded conspiracy theories and Bill Gates has nothing to do with it. Yes. And then there's also this other thing that people were raising because the president went very vocal about this project.

that he wants people to vaccinate their livestock. And when he faced opposition, the more opposition he faced, the more vocal he became. Have you spoken to farmers about this?

Yes, we have spoken to some farmers. Some of them have been expressing concern and saying that they don't really understand what's going on. And others have believed this conspiracy and are saying no one is going to touch my livestock. You also have some who have gotten the government's message and are saying they don't have a problem with having their livestock vaccinated. I want to find out a bit more about Bill Gates and what he's got to do with all of this. His name just gets dragged into every conspiracy theory, doesn't it? And it

It's probably because he is one of the richest men in the world. What has he said before on the subject of cows and vaccines? He has been vocal about the emission of methane. There's one particular interview. This is one of the videos that people are posting around that, claiming that he's connected, where he talks about the fact that if we need to tackle the emission of greenhouse gases, he was explaining the various options that exist. One of it was...

Yeah, the fact that you could make meat without cows. The other one would be you could vaccinate the cows and you change the microbes in their guts so that you reduce the levels of methane emissions. These are not projects that have already started being implemented. They are in trial stage. At this point, no vaccine has been approved for testing in animals. We spoke to experts who confirmed that. So,

It's not possible that there could have been a vaccine that could have been flown to Kenya and be injected on cattle for the control of methane emission here. It sounds like what a lot of Bill Gates has said has been taken out of context. This kind of reminds me of the anti-vaccine scepticism that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. And a lot of it is still around India.

Now, what's the connection here between the anti-COVID-19 vaccine and this anti-vax movement? The connection is that the anti-COVID vaccines, the conspiracists and the sceptics, they believed that Bill Gates has this agenda to depopulate Africa. And when you now look at livestock, they are twisting the message and now saying that he has this agenda to destroy the livestock in Africa.

So he's being portrayed as an enemy of Africa. So anything that is connected with him is not good for the continent. I want to pause here so you can find out a bit more about Bill Gates and why his name has become a part of so many different conspiracies. Here's the BBC's disinformation reporter, Jackie Wakefield.

So Bill Gates is at the center of so many anti-vaccine conspiracy theories because he is the most recognizable face of public health. He's been really public about his work and his vaccine advocacy and funding efforts in the U.S., but also in Africa and Asia.

The Gates Foundation has been instrumental in setting up some really large non-profits and foundations that have tackled preventable diseases in Africa, Asia and around the world more generally. One example of that is Gavi, which was founded in 2000. The Gates Foundation provided $750 million in seed funding and $4 billion in funds overall.

But what they really did was connect governments and large organizations to fund this effort, which provided 440 million immunizations and averted 6 million deaths globally.

There's no shortage of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Some people accuse him of leading a class of global elites. Others believe he's leading efforts to depopulate the world. Other people accuse him of making vaccines mandatory or even attempting to implant microchips into people.

All of these theories have been thoroughly debunked, but they're particularly prominent around the Gates Foundation in Africa and India. One theory is that the Gates Foundation's $10 billion of funding for WHO, or the World Health Organization, allowed them to chemically sterilize millions of Kenyan women with a tetanus vaccine.

This is completely untrue and points to this overall theory that people believe that he's trying to sterilize and control populations. This has been disproven. There's never been any evidence of the Gates Foundation attempting to sterilize or control the population and vaccine advocacy generally.

It really exploded in COVID because there were a few speeches and events where Bill Gates had really been talking about the need to be prepared for a pandemic and the risk of an infectious disease. For a very long time, there was a 2015 speech in particular where he said the greatest risk to humanity was an infectious virus.

So during COVID-19, five years later, many conspiracy theorists jumped on this speech, pointing to it to say, look, he knew what happened. This was planned by Bill Gates and other elites that he was associated with. This was completely debunked. A lot of experts agreed with him at the time that this was a very real risk and that we should have been more prepared for a pandemic and that we knew this would come eventually. ♪

Peter, Bill Gates is a massive philanthropist. He's developed and funded a number of significant health projects around the world and in Africa. Are there any recent events that might be fueling these latest Bill Gates vaccine conspiracy theories? For Kenya specifically, there's also something interesting that happened in a few weeks before this became a big issue. In that, as you talked about the philanthropy aspect of Bill Gates, these are the Gates Foundation,

The government made an announcement where they were trying to give them some privileges and immunities so that the operations could improve in the country. And that also ended up getting backlash because they were asking, what is so special about the Gates Foundation? That issue went to the courts and the announcement was suspended. But people were sort of drawing that connection and saying, the government is trying to give them privileges because it's receiving money and funding from Bill Gates.

We got in touch with the Gates Foundation and they said they are not involved at all with the Kenya's vaccination programme. It sounds like there were a bunch of different factors that led to this backlash. Off the back of the COVID-19 vaccination scepticism, there was the protests and all of the financial stuff. It just created like a

a fire of conspiracy theories that has seems to have kind of got a bit out of hand. What can be done to counter some of that disinformation, do you think? The key thing that happens when all this misinformation and the conspiracies are spreading, what people need is a voice they can trust and they need assurances about what is going on. For the Kenya's case, when you look at it, the politicians were the ones who are mainly communicating, passing the message.

and they were issuing threats, they were using threats. So you start from a level where people already don't trust the government,

And then instead of the government offering assurances, it's pushing back and even issuing threats. So that even made the opposition stronger. But over time, we have seen a slight shift in how the government is handling it, where it's leaving it to the technical experts within the ministry to communicate the message. What has the government in Kenya said in response to all of these allegations and all these theories? The government has been giving assurance that the vaccines have nothing to do with the Medina missions.

And they are safe. They are vaccines that the farmers have been using for ages. And they have also insisted that the vaccination will be voluntary. No farmer will be forced to have their livestock vaccinated. It's free. The farmer is not paying anything for his or her livestock to be vaccinated. Peter, thank you so much for coming into the studio. Thank you.

The anti-vax movement has been making headlines a lot recently, especially with Donald Trump's controversial pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US Health Secretary. And while RFK Jr. says he is pro-vaccine, he's made a number of anti-vaccine statements in the past and has been accused of embracing conspiracy theories himself.

This nomination comes at a time when trust in institutions, from health services to governments, is eroding. And it's got a lot to do with the pandemic, when many people were sceptical about official guidance, which created fertile ground for misinformation to thrive. So where do we go from here? As Peter said, restoring public trust will require transparency, empathy and, of course, scientific evidence to back things up.

That is it for today's episode. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

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