How we betray our daughters in the name of health and healthcare.
Something quietly devastating is unfolding in Ghana. Under the banner of “universal healthcare,” young girls between the ages of nine and fourteen are being vaccinated with HPV—often without parental consent. The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service hails this as a “victory for equity and prevention for women.” But what kind of victory begins by denying parents the right to protect their own children?
In photographs released by the Health Service, uniformed schoolgirls stand in dusty courtyards, sleeves rolled up, awaiting loaded needles. Classrooms have become makeshift clinics; education turned into a site of unethical compliance. There are no public forums, no parental briefings—only the quiet presumption that the state and its foreign partners know what is best for our children.
The stated goal is sweeping: to vaccinate 2.4 million girls across Ghana. The campaign is financed by global health institutions—the WHO, USAID, and a web of international NGOs. On paper, it is a vaccination against cervical cancer, which claims roughly 2,000 Ghanaian women each year. In theory, it is a triumph of modern healthcare. But for those who know the long, uneasy history of population policy in Africa, the subtext is impossible to ignore.
For decades, Western philanthropies and development agencies—from the Gates Foundation to the GAVI Alliance—have fixated on Africa’s so-called “high fertility rate.” Their language may have evolved, but their anxiety has not: too many births, too many bodies, too many futures to manage, all against the backdrop of a fast-declining Caucasian population. And so, Black “population control” is now repackaged as “reproductive health” and “equity.” The syringe has become the symbol of progress—yet the needle, metaphorically and perhaps literally, is loaded with population-killing agents, not vaccines.
The greater tragedy is not foreign interference—it is domestic complicity. Ghana’s political class, the self-proclaimed “modernizers,” have confused subservience with sophistication. They parrot the mantras of “global partnerships” and “health equity,” yet fail to ask the most basic questions about consent, oversight, and sovereignty. They have traded moral agency for donor approval—and funding.
In a country still struggling to provide clean water and sanitation in many schools, the sight of young girls lined up in dusty compounds for injections—and walking back the next morning along untarred, muddy roads—is nothing short of jarring. These are not scenes of empowerment; they are scenes of quiet coercion, and perhaps, of forced sterilization.
Let’s be clear: there is growing evidence questioning both the value of certain vaccines and the fairness of healthcare access in the twenty-first century—especially when the same West that insists on injecting African girls with its drugs refuses to democratize or share the manufacturing processes of these so-called vaccines. When medical interventions are carried out without transparency, informed consent, or local accountability, they cease to be health programs—they become instruments of political and population control.
When the story of this era is written, the disgrace will not rest solely with the global health bureaucrats or Western philanthropists—they have always been explicit about their ambitions. The true shame will belong to Ghana’s own leaders, the Metha, who stood by and called this ethical catastrophe “progress.”
Narmer Amenuti, this is the Ministry of Health. If the vaccine is not good, they should be able to determine that. Childhood immunization has saved a lot of life in the world.
They have also sterilized a lot of women here and in many other African nations.
Kwame. My brother. Good sanitation has been responsible for at least 90 percent of the gains made in the last century in healthcare. Hence when brother Narmer writes that “In a country still struggling to provide clean water and sanitation in many schools, the sight of young girls lined up in dusty compounds for injections—and walking back the next morning along untarred, muddy roads—is nothing short of jarring. “
Please, I recognize the immense importance of sanitation.
But I am a pharmaceutical scientist with specialty in vaccines. I also have more than 15 years experience in public health and disease control in Ghana, West Africa and United States.
I know there are many people who are trying to take advantage of us and with genocidal plans for us, but we need the childhood immunization program.
We have enough resources and expertise to check the safety of these foreign vaccines, and most importantly, we are capable of producing our own vaccines
Kwame. We can respect your expertise like advising us to drink 8 glasses of water a day. But what is this insistence on making this vaccination schedule mandatory? Why are parents left out of the decision? And what has a vaccine got to do with preparing students for BECE? I am afraid that School has become a source of Free Lifetime Patients for the Multinational Medical Industrialist complex that is providing these very vaccines. No one has asked WHO, USAID, CDC and such for any help in Ghana. Why are they here? Don’t they have their own countries?
Kwame, my brother, thanks for sharing. Respect! I am a Molecular Biologist myself. I have been for 32 years. I say there’s no way in Heaven you can detect all the strange molecules that a vial can contain. No way. In Ghana? Most of the compounds in these vials are proprietary. They don’t supply the formulas nor the recipes. What are you talking about?
Kwame. Have you seen this study? Sharing one very important study even in the US with you: https://www.kpbs.org/news/health/2025/07/08/the-health-of-u-s-kids-has-declined-significantly-since-2007-new-study-finds?
The statistics have it that 27 out of 100,000 get infected by cervical cancer. Though every number is regrettable, but how can this insignificant number warrant an extraordinary marshaling of response?
Nana Kwaku. Correct. The response is clearly disproportionate and for that matter we can only infer that there’s a clandestine motive.
I didn’t take you for an antivaxxer and conspiracy theorist. I can agree however on the process not been transparent and consultative enough.
Elly Kem I think you have mischaracterized me. I am pro Choice: Body Autonomy and Sovereignty. As for the rest, I agree with you.
It is sad that people like those in the Ministry of Health, like the Minister and the Deputy Minister, only believe that the West and the US in particular provide solutions for global health. But really as the article Narmer shared above shows, they cannot even solve their own country’s health problems. There are immense problems with US healthcare. They are actually at the bottom of the so-called developed nations in health. Why do we accept advise from people who cannot manage the health of their own citizens?
Human rights activists have gone to great lengths to know the ingredients in the cocktail that is to be used against people on death row to make sure that it is humane. And these are the rights that are extended to people who are convicted of committing crimes. Meanwhile, if we so much as ask what is in the cocktail that is given to our daughters of childbearing age, we are called conspiracy theorists who should just blindly trust that foreign companies have our interests in mind. Nonsense!