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Abstract
Public health programmes have done enormous good in Africa and elsewhere in the global
south, but have also been met with skepticism. This skepticism often takes the form
of rumours about the motives or the results of the public health intervention. One
recurrent theme in such rumours is the centrality of reproductive bodies (both male
and female), and the perception that these bodies are being rendered sterile by toxic
compounds given under the guise of improving health. Public health operations research
has identified these rumours as significant obstacles to programme delivery, but they
have been treated primarily as failures in communication, to be rectified by the provision
of more accurate information. Using reports of such rumours from public health interventions
in Africa, with emphasis on vaccines, I argue that these rumours are more than simply
stories which are not true. The widespread rumour of sterility is a way of articulating
broadly shared understandings about reproductive bodies, collective survival, and
global asymmetries of power. I use Foucault's notion of biopolitics to theorize international
public health programmes, and introduce the concept of counter-epistemic convergence
to account for the ubiquity and persistence of sterility rumours.