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, Kennedy’s HHS was about to fund a study that 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.
Earlier today, the Guardian revealed 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, 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.
“This is another Tuskegee,” one anonymous CDC official told Inside Medicine prior to the trial’s cancellation.
They were refering to the Tuskegee syphilis study, an infamous experiment that ran from 1932 until 1972 in which 600 poor Black men with syphilis were studied to understand the long-term effects of the disease in exchange for “free medical care” from the US government.
The catch? Though penicillin was discovered to be an effective treatment for syphilis in 1943, study subjects were never offered the antibiotic, or even told they had syphilis in the first place — leaving them to suffer the full effects of the debilitating infection, even though it was fully treatable. It remains one of the most barbaric biomedical research studies in US history, and its cruelty is still felt to this day.
Continuing, the CDC official told Inside Medicine that “we are allowing children, infants, to be exposed to Hepatitis B when we could prevent it, and then follow them for five years to see what happens. That’s not long enough to see the long-term benefits, but might be long enough to find some non-specific effects.”
“Non-specific effects” is a key buzzword swirling around Kennedy’s orbit of vaccine skeptics and holistic wellness influences, which essentially means “unintended harms.” The HHS’s chosen researchers for the Guinea-Bissau study were Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, a controversial Danish couple who have spent years chasing after non-specific effects in vaccines.
Thankfully, “the good guys won,” as Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician told the Guardian. “This administration did not see people in Africa as valuable… We were able to stand up for them. We were able to convince people about the fact that this was unethical.”
More on bioethics: Genetics Startup Advertises App-Based Eugenics Service for Parents to Select “Smartest” Embryos