People can still get an mRNA coronavirus vaccine in Japan – they just have to pay for it. And the country’s ageing population has nothing to do with the jab.

MARY ALEXANDER • 17 APRIL 2024
Published by Africa Check on 19 April 2024

The wealthy Asian country of Japan has banned mRNA Covid vaccines after they were linked to “sudden soaring deaths”.

That’s the claim circulating on social media in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere since late March 2024.*

It reads:

Japan has just banned Covid mRNA shots […] and called on other nations to follow suit after an official government study tied the injections to the nation’s soaring sudden deaths. Like many other countries around the world, Japan has been battling a crisis of skyrocketing sudden and unexpected deaths since 2021 […] the country is now facing population collapse […]

The claim has mainly been spread by an identical article published here, here, here and here. It’s attracted comments such as:

• Thank God that I wasn’t that stupid and none of my family members were that stupid to take that COVID shots….
• WAKE UP PEOPLE THE TRUTH IS ALL AROUND YOU ALREADY!!

The claim can also be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

But it’s completely made up.

More than four years after Covid upended the world in 2020, dodgy websites are still trying to get clicks – and ad money – from false claims about the pandemic and the vaccines that helped bring it to a close.

Emergency vaccination legislation comes to an end

Japan has not banned mRNA vaccines. Instead, “temporary vaccinations” introduced in an amendment to the country’s Immunisation Act in 2021 expired at the end of March 2024.

The amendment made “immunisations with an urgent need for prevention” during the Covid pandemic available for free. People can still get an mRNA jab in Japan. The only difference is that most of them now have to pay for it.

From 1 April people aged 65 and older are to get the Covid jab, at a subsidised price, as a routine inoculation during the country’s autumn and winter. People under 65 who choose voluntary vaccination have to pay in full.

And far from banning mRNA Covid vaccines, in January Japanese regulators launched a new-generation mRNA vaccine that is the first of its kind to get official approval.

As Japan hasn’t banned mRNA jabs, it couldn’t have “called on other nations to follow suit”.

More than this, there is no credible evidence of any “official government study” that links Covid vaccines to the country’s “soaring sudden deaths”. Such a study would have made global headlines.

The country does have a relatively high death rate, but it’s not caused by Covid jabs.

An ageing population

Japan’s population crisis has been in the news recently, especially after the country reported that there had been a record high of 1.56 million deaths in 2022.

But this is due to an ageing population caused by a low birth rate. In 2023 government figures revealed that people aged 65 and older made up nearly 30% of Japan’s population, and people 80 and older made up 10%. In the same year, the country had its lowest number of births since records began in 1899.

The population decline has alarmed Japan’s government, which pumps some US$25 billion a year into subsidies for families with children in an effort to boost the birth rate.

But it’s still a decline, not a population “collapse”. The country’s population growth was at its lowest in 2022 – a negative 0.46% – but over the long term, the number of people in Japan has increased from 93.22 million in 1960 to 125.12 million in 2022.

And there are indications that the high number of excess deaths in 2022 were due to Covid itself – not the jabs that protected people from the disease.

Using an ad-blocking browser extension, Africa Check looked at the number of ads on web pages publishing the false claim. Six ads were blocked here, two here and here, and a whopping 14 here.

* Some claims posted on Facebook and Instagram may have been deleted by users after being rated via Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program.