The Trump administration is facing condemnation over a medical study in West Africa that is being condemned as unethical and reminiscent of the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment.” Now that the proposed study on infants in a small African country has been exposed to public scrutiny, the fate of the study remains unclear.
CDC source warns of unethical, harmful study
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is providing $1.6 million in funding for a study in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau on the effects of vaccinating newborns for Hepatitis B, but critics warn that the study has major ethical concerns. The newsletter Inside Medicine first reported previously unpublicized details about the plan and criticisms from experts. Ahead of a 2027 policy to vaccinate all newborns in Guinea-Bissau against Hep B, a disease for which nearly 20% of the local population are carriers, a group of Danish researchers has received funding to study the impact of the vaccine. Under the study, some newborns will be given the Hepatitis B vaccine along with other newborn vaccinations, while other newborns will not be given the Hep B vaccine. Medical experts and ethicists have warned that intentionally denying a group of babies the Hep B vaccine will ensure that some of them contract the disease, which can have debilitating consequences later in life, including cancer, and even cause death.
“You can’t deny people the gold standard in a clinical trial,” said one CDC source speaking anonymously. “No US IRB would ever sign off on this. So, this is illegal, which is being ignored.” Furthermore, experts also say that the vaccine has already been proven safe, and the study of its long-term effects is being driven by the agenda of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long pushed the idea that vaccines cause harm. “This is another Tuskegee,” said the CDC official. “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.”
Conflicting reports on the current status of the study
The criticism by the CDC source references the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a federally funded study in which hundreds of Black men in Alabama were not informed that they had syphilis and not treated in order to observe the progression of the debilitating and ultimately deadly disease. Now that the Guinea-Bissau study has received public scrutiny over its ethical concerns, the fate of the study is unclear. An official with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters Thursday, “The study has been cancelled.”
However, Futurism reports that a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said that “the trial will proceed as planned.” The HHS official said that “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.” The HHS statement also defended the study as “the world’s first, and potentially only, opportunity to rigorously evaluate the overall health effects of HBV0,” the Hepatitis B vaccine being examined.
Given conflicting statements, it remains unclear whether or not this study will still happen as planned, or whether it will be altered or cancelled altogether. For now, it appears that the Trump administration continues to pursue the study, dismissing concerns that the experimental design is unethical and that the study will lead to preventable harm to children in a small West African country.
