Rwandans say that local law enforcement authorities are rounding up individuals to physically force coronavirus vaccine doses injections without consent.
Police Go Door-To-Door to Deliver Shots Without Consent
Deutsche Welle (DW) reported this week that local Rwandan government officials, including local police in rural areas, went door-to-door to roust people from their homes and inject them without their consent.
The report said the practice primarily involved impoverished Rwandans including street children and suspected criminals in more remote Rwandan transit centers in the Western Province’s Ngororero district nearly 40 miles northwest of Kigali, the nation’s capital.
Rwanda: Africa’s mRNA Production Hub
Rwanda and BioNTech SE announced in October that the African nation would be home to the first state-of-the-art manufacturing site for mRNA-based vaccines in the African Union by mid-2022.
“This is the next step in BioNTech’s efforts to implement sustainable end-to-end vaccine supply solutions on the African continent,” BioNTech said in a statement.
Low Vaccination Rates in Africa
Rates of vaccination in Africa are among the world’s lowest at about six percent continent-wide, or about 77 percent of the population. That is far fewer than the World Health Organization’s missed goal of 40 percent vaccination rates by the end of 2021.
The reasons for Africa’s slow pace of vaccination include supply-chain problems include logistical challenges like finding enough cold storage facilities across a vast, mostly rural landmass to poor perceptions of recent pandemic responses to diseases like human immunodeficiency virus and ebola.
African nations have also sought to deploy diverse methodologies to contain the pandemic including exploring use of ivermectin and other therapeutics and the use of so-called “vaccine bonds” to fund the manufacture of drugs that may not have a strong enough profit incentive.
Legacy Public Health Practices in Africa Inform Vaccine Hesitancy
A recent PLOS One survey of 5,416 respondents across 34 African countries and the African diaspora found that only 63 percent were willing to take COVID vaccines “as soon as possible,” 79 percent were worried about side effects and 39 percent feared vaccine-associated infections.
Amid relatively low caseloads (about 10 million as of January 8) and slow COVID vaccine uptake across Africa, some nations have attempted to impose mandates.
Rwanda represents a troubling pandemic trend where emergency public health policies have been advanced by governments without strong rule of law or human rights safeguards.
Rwanda’s Fragile Social Order
Rwanda suffered one of history’s worst genocides in 1994 when as many as 800,000 killings took place, nearly all of them committed by machete-wielding members of the Hutu ethnic group against their ethnic rivals, the Tutsis, within only 100 days.
In the decades that followed, Rwandans have striven to reconcile and build one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. But the landlocked nation has also struggled with bouts of authoritarian and sometimes violent government repression.
COVID Mandates and Human Rights
In 2020, a United Nations Development Programme report on COVID policies on Rwandan human rights cited infringement on freedom of expression, movement, assembly, and deterioration of rule of law. The international agency said it “strongly believes that there is still room for improvement in terms of human rights protection in relation to the challenges posed by of COVID-19.”
Forced vaccinations have been reported in other nations including China, which has also been accused of “disappearing” critics of the government’s vaccine policies.