Guinea-Bissau Police Seize Hepatitis B Vaccine Doses Bound for a Newborn Trial Experts Call Unethical
Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers on Monday and seized doses of hepatitis B vaccine that had been intended for a trial in newborns. International health experts have called that trial unethical, and the anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to fund it with US taxpayer money.
Under Kennedy, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in December that it had given the researchers — Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, a married couple at the Bandim Health Project — an unsolicited $1.6 million grant to run the trial. Plans for the trial were halted in January after widespread condemnation of a design that could have exposed thousands of newborns in the country to hepatitis B, risking a lifelong infection that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cancer and premature death.
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The funding route is the strangest part: a federal health agency handing an unsolicited grant to researchers whose signature claim is that vaccines cause harms the mainstream has overlooked.
And by Ars Technica's account of a Rolling Stone story, the CDC set aside another $1.6 million in late September and planned to move ahead anyway — which makes Monday's seizure look less like a conclusion than one scene in a longer fight.