On the surface, it looks like an excellent story of medical innovation; another attempt to reduce the scourge of infectious diseases especially in Africa, a continent which has been racked with successive waves of the most appalling diseases known to humanity from HIV to Dengue fever and the Ebola virus. Researchers want to run a clinical trial on an infant vaccine against Hepatitis B in the west African country of Guinea-Bassau an incurable and frequently fatal disease which affects up to one in five adults in that nation. Hepatitis B kills in the most painful and degrading ways possible though liver cancer or liver cirrhosis and in a nation such as Guinea-Bassau that lacks any sort of functioning public health and hospice care services; news of such a development is surely a godsend. What’s not to like?
But strip back the back story (or more accurately the emerging front story) to this clinical trial, then a much more disturbing vista emerges. For why run a ‘trial’ on a vaccine that was developed in the 1970s, licensed in the 1980s and which is widely regarded as safe and effective? The explanatory trail leads all the way back to the US Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK, Jr), and his pathological anti-vaccine agenda that he has pursued for many years before entering President Donald Trump’s second administration. For the question, the trial is posing is whether or not there are unnoticed side effects caused by giving the babies the vaccines within hours of birth which is the current protocol. If one recalls that vaccine scepticism towards, for example, the Covid-19 vaccine was based not overtly on administration of the vaccine itself but in isolated incidence of cardiopathic responses of miniscule proportions of those who had taken the shot, then such drip-by-drip attempts to undermine public trust in vaccine safety as opposed to overt blanket opposition to inoculation makes sense. The idea is to sow confusion and uncertainty among the public in order to undermine vaccination programmes. Introducing a cloud of ambiguity was the MO behind Dr Andrew Wakefield’s notoriously fraudulent study of eight child subjects in 1998 which purported to show a link between receipt of the MMR vaccine by infants at eighteen months and the onset of autism and which has been categorically debunked but not before the re-emergence of measles in certain parts of the world due to the drop in herd immunity levels caused by belief in the MMR-autism link by worried parents.
The damage that would be wrought by this unnecessary clinical trial would be even worse at the micro level for the people of Guinea-Bassau. For without vaccination, around 14 in every 100 babies born of mothers of Hepatitis B will develop chronic hepatitis themselves. If babies receive a vaccine at birth, with routine doses on follow-up, that drops to just four in a hundred. But without that birth shot, the rate almost doubles to seven or eight per hundred[1].
Anti-vaccine groups cover their tracks with the common ruse that there is nothing sinister in checking if something is safe, all the while deliberatively refusing to recognise welters of evidence that prove the given vaccine or procedure is safe. And vaccine trialling does not come without human cost. A randomised control trial necessitates that a large cohort of people do not get the treatment – meaning that babies in a country where one in five mothers has Hep B would be denied a working, lifesaving treatment, just to satisfy the curiosities of RFK, Jr, and his deluded, cultish followers.[2]
But why pick Guinea-Bassau for an experiment to test the side-effects as opposed to the efficacy of vaccines? The answer is that no similar clinical trial would meet required ethical standards in the US or any other advanced First World nation. The legally dubious nature of the proposed trial were sufficiently apparent to the judicial police in Guinea-Bassau who raided the offices of the researchers and seized Hep B vax doses in order to clarify the circumstances surrounding the vaccine.[3]
The researchers were associated with the Bandim Health Project and received $3.2m in combined funding from the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the Pershing Foundation, and the Bluebell Foundation. The research was controversial because of RFK Jr’s eulogising of Bandim Health Project’s co-founders Peter Aby and Christie Hubell as “the deities of vaccine research” for their work on the supposed effects of the DTP (Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussion) vaccine. He praised Aby as a ‘very famous’ researcher on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2023. He also cited Aby’s work in discussions surrounding his decision to halt US aid to Gavi – the Global Vaccine Alliance. RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views were a major factor in the shelving of an Agricultural Department’s avian flu response plan in February 2025, according to five people with direct knowledge of the matter; a pause which caused alarm amongst lawmakers as it is at that time that wild birds begin migrating for the winter.[4]
As stated, before vaccination within 24 hours of birth is an established public health intervention that can automatically reduce the risks of infection. Tarik Jasoevic, a WHO spokesperson, has stated that withholding the immunisation would be unethical and would expose new-borns to serious and potentially irreversible harm. In the words of Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has stated bluntly that Kennedy ‘wants to make it so we don’t use a birth dose here in this country…. That’s the goal.”[5]
Stig Bassen Hansen, a founding member of the project based at the University of Southern Denmark where an ethics committee gave the go-ahead for the trial, resigned from it on these grounds:
A closer look at the health profile of Guinea-Bassau and the nexus between the Bandim Health Project and figures within the African nation’s administration throws into sharp relief the preposterous nature of the now abandoned clinical trial. Guinea-Bassau has some of the highest rates of Hep B globally with about 8% of adults carrying the virus. While it may be transmitted from mother to child during birth, it can also be transmitted from another parent, relative, sibling, or caregiver. Children infected with Hep B in the first year of life are significantly more likely to develop severe outcomes, including chronic infection and liver cancer.[7]
The Bandim Health Project has operated in Guinea-Bassau for decades and is closely embedded in the country’s health system. In the words of Mogda Rabolo, former health minister and president of the Institute for Global Health and Development in Guinea-Bassau, the country does not have a single credible institution in public health at this point in time. It is hardly surprising that at least one top official, the current director of public health held a dual appointment with Bandim as recently as December 2025 and that mixed messages have emanated from what pass as health authorities on approval of the clinical trials.[8]
The health security of the people of Guinea-Bassau to the depredations of such experiments would have been further imperilled by the obstacles to obtaining informed consent because of low literacy rates and language barriers. For the phrase in the local Creole for Hep B and any other illness causing jaundice is “febri amarelu” or a yellow fever which is also the name of a separate disease. How is any form of “informed consent” possible in such a milieu?[9]
But for once there is a happy, if not ever after encomium, to this story. For in a post on his LinkedIn account on Wednesday October 21st , the lead researcher on the project Frederic Schultz-Buchhalzer announced that the trial had been halted as it had not been given the necessary government approval.[10] Global outrage at this attempt by influential voices and interests in the US to coax a vulnerable African nation into hosting a totally unethical and likely harmful “clinical trial” which they would not dare attempt on their fellow citizens has led to this very welcome climbdown. Voices around the African continent have been alerted to this attempt to exploit, in the words of Robolo “the asymmetric relationship between Global North research institutions and the Global South”[11] in order to foist this Tuskegee type medical experiment on an unsuspecting population. Is it too much to expect that this is a first step towards vaccine justice in its totality for the Global South.
But strip back the back story (or more accurately the emerging front story) to this clinical trial, then a much more disturbing vista emerges. For why run a ‘trial’ on a vaccine that was developed in the 1970s, licensed in the 1980s and which is widely regarded as safe and effective? The explanatory trail leads all the way back to the US Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK, Jr), and his pathological anti-vaccine agenda that he has pursued for many years before entering President Donald Trump’s second administration. For the question, the trial is posing is whether or not there are unnoticed side effects caused by giving the babies the vaccines within hours of birth which is the current protocol. If one recalls that vaccine scepticism towards, for example, the Covid-19 vaccine was based not overtly on administration of the vaccine itself but in isolated incidence of cardiopathic responses of miniscule proportions of those who had taken the shot, then such drip-by-drip attempts to undermine public trust in vaccine safety as opposed to overt blanket opposition to inoculation makes sense. The idea is to sow confusion and uncertainty among the public in order to undermine vaccination programmes. Introducing a cloud of ambiguity was the MO behind Dr Andrew Wakefield’s notoriously fraudulent study of eight child subjects in 1998 which purported to show a link between receipt of the MMR vaccine by infants at eighteen months and the onset of autism and which has been categorically debunked but not before the re-emergence of measles in certain parts of the world due to the drop in herd immunity levels caused by belief in the MMR-autism link by worried parents.
The damage that would be wrought by this unnecessary clinical trial would be even worse at the micro level for the people of Guinea-Bassau. For without vaccination, around 14 in every 100 babies born of mothers of Hepatitis B will develop chronic hepatitis themselves. If babies receive a vaccine at birth, with routine doses on follow-up, that drops to just four in a hundred. But without that birth shot, the rate almost doubles to seven or eight per hundred[1].
Anti-vaccine groups cover their tracks with the common ruse that there is nothing sinister in checking if something is safe, all the while deliberatively refusing to recognise welters of evidence that prove the given vaccine or procedure is safe. And vaccine trialling does not come without human cost. A randomised control trial necessitates that a large cohort of people do not get the treatment – meaning that babies in a country where one in five mothers has Hep B would be denied a working, lifesaving treatment, just to satisfy the curiosities of RFK, Jr, and his deluded, cultish followers.[2]
But why pick Guinea-Bassau for an experiment to test the side-effects as opposed to the efficacy of vaccines? The answer is that no similar clinical trial would meet required ethical standards in the US or any other advanced First World nation. The legally dubious nature of the proposed trial were sufficiently apparent to the judicial police in Guinea-Bassau who raided the offices of the researchers and seized Hep B vax doses in order to clarify the circumstances surrounding the vaccine.[3]
The researchers were associated with the Bandim Health Project and received $3.2m in combined funding from the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the Pershing Foundation, and the Bluebell Foundation. The research was controversial because of RFK Jr’s eulogising of Bandim Health Project’s co-founders Peter Aby and Christie Hubell as “the deities of vaccine research” for their work on the supposed effects of the DTP (Diptheria-Tetanus-Pertussion) vaccine. He praised Aby as a ‘very famous’ researcher on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2023. He also cited Aby’s work in discussions surrounding his decision to halt US aid to Gavi – the Global Vaccine Alliance. RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views were a major factor in the shelving of an Agricultural Department’s avian flu response plan in February 2025, according to five people with direct knowledge of the matter; a pause which caused alarm amongst lawmakers as it is at that time that wild birds begin migrating for the winter.[4]
As stated, before vaccination within 24 hours of birth is an established public health intervention that can automatically reduce the risks of infection. Tarik Jasoevic, a WHO spokesperson, has stated that withholding the immunisation would be unethical and would expose new-borns to serious and potentially irreversible harm. In the words of Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has stated bluntly that Kennedy ‘wants to make it so we don’t use a birth dose here in this country…. That’s the goal.”[5]
Stig Bassen Hansen, a founding member of the project based at the University of Southern Denmark where an ethics committee gave the go-ahead for the trial, resigned from it on these grounds:
You are now enrolling numbers in a lottery to test a hypothesis … The children who are randomly selected not to receive the birth dose; those who “lost the lottery” face in their earliest possible days the risk of contracting Hep B which can cause irreversible, lifelong damage. They contact Hep B in the context of a research project which makes their infection happen, in effect, by design.[6]
A closer look at the health profile of Guinea-Bassau and the nexus between the Bandim Health Project and figures within the African nation’s administration throws into sharp relief the preposterous nature of the now abandoned clinical trial. Guinea-Bassau has some of the highest rates of Hep B globally with about 8% of adults carrying the virus. While it may be transmitted from mother to child during birth, it can also be transmitted from another parent, relative, sibling, or caregiver. Children infected with Hep B in the first year of life are significantly more likely to develop severe outcomes, including chronic infection and liver cancer.[7]
The Bandim Health Project has operated in Guinea-Bassau for decades and is closely embedded in the country’s health system. In the words of Mogda Rabolo, former health minister and president of the Institute for Global Health and Development in Guinea-Bassau, the country does not have a single credible institution in public health at this point in time. It is hardly surprising that at least one top official, the current director of public health held a dual appointment with Bandim as recently as December 2025 and that mixed messages have emanated from what pass as health authorities on approval of the clinical trials.[8]
The health security of the people of Guinea-Bassau to the depredations of such experiments would have been further imperilled by the obstacles to obtaining informed consent because of low literacy rates and language barriers. For the phrase in the local Creole for Hep B and any other illness causing jaundice is “febri amarelu” or a yellow fever which is also the name of a separate disease. How is any form of “informed consent” possible in such a milieu?[9]
But for once there is a happy, if not ever after encomium, to this story. For in a post on his LinkedIn account on Wednesday October 21st , the lead researcher on the project Frederic Schultz-Buchhalzer announced that the trial had been halted as it had not been given the necessary government approval.[10] Global outrage at this attempt by influential voices and interests in the US to coax a vulnerable African nation into hosting a totally unethical and likely harmful “clinical trial” which they would not dare attempt on their fellow citizens has led to this very welcome climbdown. Voices around the African continent have been alerted to this attempt to exploit, in the words of Robolo “the asymmetric relationship between Global North research institutions and the Global South”[11] in order to foist this Tuskegee type medical experiment on an unsuspecting population. Is it too much to expect that this is a first step towards vaccine justice in its totality for the Global South.
References
[1] James Ball. RFK, Jr’s anti-vax gamble with African babies’ lives is an experiment in cruelty. The New World 17 October 2026.
[2] Ibid
[3] Nilay Chakrobarty. Police raid offices of RFK, Jr – endorsed research planning vaccine trial for 7,000 African newborns. International Business (IB) Times UK
[4] Rachel Shin and Marcia. Brown RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views helped sideline a bird flu plan. Politico.
[5] Melody Schreiber. Experts fear ‘unethical’ vaccine is a prototype for US studies under RFK, Jr.
[6] Ibid
[7] Melody Scheiber. Controversial vaccine trial touted by RFK, Jr gets go-ahead in Guinea-Bassau.
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Melody Scheiber Controversial US-backed trial on African newborns halted
[11] Ibid
[1] James Ball. RFK, Jr’s anti-vax gamble with African babies’ lives is an experiment in cruelty. The New World 17 October 2026.
[2] Ibid
[3] Nilay Chakrobarty. Police raid offices of RFK, Jr – endorsed research planning vaccine trial for 7,000 African newborns. International Business (IB) Times UK
[4] Rachel Shin and Marcia. Brown RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views helped sideline a bird flu plan. Politico.
[5] Melody Schreiber. Experts fear ‘unethical’ vaccine is a prototype for US studies under RFK, Jr.
[6] Ibid
[7] Melody Scheiber. Controversial vaccine trial touted by RFK, Jr gets go-ahead in Guinea-Bassau.
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Melody Scheiber Controversial US-backed trial on African newborns halted
[11] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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