Don't give precious airtime to anti-vaccination crusaders - GJA Pres to media

The President of the Ghana Journalists Association, Roland Affail Monney, is admonishing the media to avoid the temptations of giving airtime to persons with the aim of propagating anti-vaccination.

He said that with the enormous confidence and task that the media is reposed with, particularly in the area of education, we should be guided by how much people trust the contents we produce and avoid indirectly promoting the erroneous myths being propagated around about the vaccines.

Ghana became the first country in the world to receive the first 600,000 doses of the vaccines from the COVAX facility on Wednesday, February 24, 2021.

As part of leadership and as a way of demystifying the myths surrounding the vaccines, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his wife, the Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia, and his wife, all took the vaccines on live TV, being the first in the country to do so.

Other groups of persons and personalities have continuous gone out to take their jabs at the various designated vaccination locations.

Speaking with GhanaWeb moments after taking his jab, Roland Affail Monney called on the media to do away with the tendencies to promote wrong ideologies about the vaccination.

“We have a collective responsibility reposed by our profession, as role models, to encourage as many people as possible, or even all Ghanaians to take the vaccines, and what will be the signal we send out there if we decide not to take the vaccine. All the theories about the vaccine, against the vaccine, most of them are rooted in ignorance and as journalists, our foremost responsibility is education so we need to intensity and scale-up our educational mechanisms so that Ghanaians will embrace the vaccines and also take them

“We should not give precious airtime to anti-vaccine agents because many Ghanaians are inclined to swallow whatever is peddled on the media – they swallow hook, line and sinker, whatever comes from the media space. They say prevention is better than cure and an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Contextually, we ought not allow people who pollute the minds of fellow Ghanaians on the vaccine to play their dirty games. We should talk to people who will propagate the gospel of the vaccination so that collectively, we’ll win the fight against the insidious virus,” he admonished.