What do you get when you put a vaccine conspiracy theorist in charge of the agency responsible for funding medical research throughout the globe? A recipe for Tuskegee 2.0, apparently.
Some bombshell reporting over the last month has revealed a monstrous plan by Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services to fund a $1.6 million study on hepatitis B vaccines among 14,000 newborns in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau. As protocol documents obtained by Inside Medicine show, the study would have been a “randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of neonatal Hepatitis B vaccination on early-life mortality, morbidity, and long-term developmental outcomes.”
In other words, the study aims to withheld Hep B vaccinations from 7,000 infants in one of the poorest countries on earth — so that western researchers could compare their long-term health to babies that got the vaccine.
This is where things get hazy. This week, the Guardian reported that the trial — slated to begin in 2027 — had been halted by officials in Guinea-Bissau, after weeks of outrage from health officials and researchers. Instead, the Africa CDC told the Guardian the study would be reworked to address the ethics concerns that have become a rallying cry in the medical research community.
“The study has been cancelled,” Africa CDC official Yap Boum said on Thursday, the newspaper reported.
But a spokesperson for the HHS pushed back strongly, saying the study was forging ahead.
“To be clear, the trial will proceed as planned,” HHS assistant secretary for public affairs told us in a statement.
“Africa CDC, an organization with no affiliation to the US CDC, shared weeks-old communications unrelated to the trial as part of a public-relations campaign aimed to shape public perception rather than engaging with the scientific facts,” he said. “This research represents the world’s first, and potentially only, opportunity to rigorously evaluate the overall health effects of HBV0.”
We’ve reached out to the HHS and the Africa CDC to try to figure out what’s going on, since the two groups seem to be disagreeing on details as basic as whether the study is still happening.
Regardless, experts are appalled at the implications of the study.
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