Many Ghanaians probably did not welcome the news of ebola trials in the Volta region with the kind of shock I did. But this is an issue that should not be left to go without a response from Ghanaians. This is in my opinion sinister and unnecessary sacrifice of Ghanaians on the alter of selfishness.
I’m amazed at our leaders who through selfish interest and spinelessness are serving this country on a platter.
My piece of mind is very simple on this matter; let our leaders right up from the President and his family through the parliamentarians and ministers and directors of the various institutions prove to us how safe these vaccines are (even then, it won’t be a comfort considering how little many of the political elite know about anything). Let them however humor me and take the shots in the full glare of Ghanaians. They should not ask some young students to go risk their lives for a paltry 200 cedis and a mobile phone (such insult).
Our leaders (so called) sat down and watched whiles Ghanaians fed on Genetically Modified Foods without even knowing it. Trials started without their knowledge. The biosafety Act was passed and the ordinary Ghanaian doesn’t know about it. In a similar vein, Ghanaians won’t even know when our food chain is contaminated with Genetically Modified Organisms.
Our country has become a dump for cheap, useless Chinese products and yet our leaders sit there and just enjoy their air-conditioned v8s. Foreigners are taking over the country and yet we lack the balls to do anything about it.
We have natural resources we cannot even mine. So what do we do? We call on foreigners to come take our gold and other resources out of the earth (using their nationals and in the process depriving our youth of jobs), take all the money and return only to sell it back to us. What hopelessness!!
And yet we have “leaders”!!
Ebola has been recorded in some countries in Africa. Why wouldn’t the trials be run on those countries since they geniunely need it. Why would you want to run trials on a country with ebola-free people? Could it be an attempt to spread it even further? Or have those ebola stricken countries realised that the genesis of ebola in their country was through vaccinations in the first place?
Why innocent young boys and girls? What have they done to deserve any sane authority using them as guinea pigs in return for a phone and 200 cedis?
Why wouldn’t the country that has a patent on the disease and the families of the inventors have a vaccine trial party in their homes?
And to think that our so called leaders are so eager to defend this on the airwaves? Leadership should start from the front!! Let them keep the Phones and the money and do the honorable deed.
By the way, who is buying a new car, or mansion on the sacrifice of these students?
And I hear medical practitioners who know next to nothing about what is happening except what they have been told gingerly defending it in their highly educated British accents. I guess they and their sort will be adequate as a sample space for whatever trials. Ghanaians have been Guinea pigs for far too long.
What kind of tests do our Food and Drugs Authority claim to have run? (Mind you it takes them sending samples all the way to Italy to determine an avian flu outbreak in Ghana as I read from citifmonline.com) So forgive me if I have only very little confidence in any tests or assurances of theirs.
Nemesis is here!!
For a brief moment, I was happy to hear that parliament had suspended the supposed trial…then I read “till further notice”. What further notice?
Where are the NUGS, TTAG, USAG, GNUPS and the lot of students and youth groups we hear about defending the Ghanaian student? Students of the volta region are being led to the slaughter. Stand up!!
I know the booklong people will seek to let everyone know how safe it is and explain it all away and probably “expose” people who stand to oppose these injustices using jargons you will never understand. Be not fooled!
Hmm, Bernard. I understand why you are emotional about this issue. But don’t forget that other nationals agreed to be used as “guinea pigs” for the development of Hepatitis B vaccine and many other vaccines.
Anyway, I smell fish with the way the vaccine trial was being pursued quietly. The trial in itself is a good thing, we need a vaccine, don’t we?
The makers of this vaccine are powerful people. The trial will definitely go on, even if not in Ghana. But lets not forget that we need that vaccine.
6 months by now we might be singing a different song.