KAMPALA – Former BBC researcher and investigative journalist Sonia Elijah has said that there is telling of one side of the story by the media and suppressing information about Covid-19 vaccines and their side effects.
Ms Sonia who was speaking in a virtual session of the weekly Covid-19 town hall meeting in Kampala on October 25 themed ‘Covid-19 and the media: Have they given us all we must know about the pandemic?’ explained that the dangers of the vaccines have completely been downplayed and completely suppressed in the mainstream media.
She revealed that despite the fact that vaccines need to be given with consent, the media is not providing this information for consented vaccination to take place and people are not giving consent and are not aware of this arrangement.
“In the mainstream media, vaccines have no known side effects that have been reported. The media is promoting vaccination as the only way out of the pandemic, they present it as 100% safe yet it is not. We have thousands of recorded adverse events including deaths of vaccinated people,” she says.
She shared that the vaccines are experimental vaccines which are under clinical trial until the end of 2022 and unless people do their own research, they would never get such information.
“When you do mass vaccination, you exert immune pressure on the virus and this propagates more infectious virus strains. We know that these vaccines don’t prevent infections but claim to prevent the severe disease and death,” she said, adding that vaccine antibodies protect on specific strains but cannot protect from all variants.
Ms Sarah Birete, the Executive Director Center for Constitutional Governance in Uganda who was also a panellist at the virtual town hall meeting said the World Bank has issued a report on how Uganda performed under the first wave of Covid.
She said when covid came to Uganda, the president declared it a war in a video that went viral, he said ‘in situations of war, everyone has to take cover and wait for strategic ways to keep safe’
“The president declared a lockdown with a militaristic approach and declared a war and ordered his security forces on the streets. The LDU’S In the first lockdown carried out human rights abuses to whichever citizen they met on the road, there was no provision for the sick in the first lockdown, pregnant women were beaten, no transport for those that needed health centers. It became as though covid was the only disease in the country and all other diseases had been suspended.”
According to Ms Birete, the report says that every life saved from Covid, Uganda lost four, especially those of babies and mothers that died giving birth.
“Uganda has been praised as a country that has managed Covid so well but the praises don’t look at the wellbeing of the people. Uganda is the country that has kept schools longest in lockdown, we have the highest levels of teenage pregnancies and the president is on record, instead of condemning defilement, he is on record for saying it is better for children to give birth than dying of covid,”she said.
She revealed that human rights violations heightened at the helm of enforcing presidential directives in the first lockdown.
“Lockdown also increased domestic violence rates, people staying home without means of feeding their families and constant staying in one place. Women were also beaten for demanding food from men who were not working.”
Simon Ssenyonga, a lawyer, shared that the media was not doing its role in deep investigation debunking some of these ideological mistruths that were being propagated by the government and politicians.
According to him, the media through the ministry of health should be able to give clear statistics on people who have recovered based on natural immunity that has been scientifically proven 99% to be much more efficient than vaccine acquired immunity but the ministry never gives these out.
Mr Senyonga said through his submissions in one of the talk shows, he was accused of challenging accepted public opinion from their perceived experts.
He says this was an attack on his freedom of worship because the choice of the prescription he wants to take for covid 19 comes from his religious consent.
“The attack on my freedom of worship as demonstrated by the president, ministry of health and subsequently the media, was further propagated by the media itself and there was eventual shadow burning on my side not only by the social media but also the mainstream media.”
