In December of last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded $1.6 million to the Bandim Health Project at the University of Southern Denmark to study the effects of a hepatitis B vaccine on 14,500 newborns in Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa.
The study has been widely criticized by the medical community for its lack of rigor and disconformity to established clinical standards but more importantly, because the hepatitis B vaccine has already been proven safe and effective and the trials involve withholding the vaccine from half of the newborns in the study.
Compared to western countries, the disease is much more prevalent in undervaccinated places like Guinea-Bissau where about 19% suffer from chronic hepatitis B infections, meaning that infants taking part in the study are at excessive risk for infection and death.
The World Health Organization estimates that 90% of infants infected within the first year will go on to develop a chronic infection and up to 25% of them will die of liver cancer or liver failure caused by the infection.
The employee who leaked the protocol for the study called it “another Tuskegee” in reference to the infamous Tuskegee Experiment where treatment for syphilis was knowingly withheld from 399 African American men, causing 100 of them to die.
The reason that the comparison holds is because, given the prevalence of hepatitis B in Guinea-Bissau, the researchers know that a subset of the newborns will have the disease, and they will knowingly withhold a treatment from them that has been conclusively established as effective. Since half of the newborns will not be given a vaccine and 19% of the population in Guinea-Bissau have the disease, it means that 1,377 babies will be allowed to have a 70-90% chance to be infected, when we could just as easily save them.
So far, this all tracks perfectly with the many concerns presented when Robert Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. He has consistently spread skepticism about vaccine safety, which is plenty harmful all on its own, but now under his leadership, the CDC is funding studies that appear to be attempting to create fraudulent evidence against vaccines.
According to Arthur L. Reingold, emeritus professor of epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, “The call for randomized trials to look at the safety of vaccines, especially ‘the long term safety’, is a tactic for casting doubt on the benefits and risks associated with vaccination by calling for studies that either would be totally unethical/impractical and/or take many years, even decades to conduct.”
Dr. Reingold agrees with virtually every medical expert: “The copious available evidence demonstrates that the HBV vaccine is very effective and prevents an infection that in its acute and chronic phases can be life-threatening.”
According to Richard Dees, professor of bioethics at the University of Rochester, “What seems most dubious about the study is that the vaccine is already well known to be safe and effective. So it does not seem to be answering a genuine question for which there is reasonable equipoise. The money spent on the study would certainly be better spent providing as wide an access as possible to the vaccine, not to engage in a pointless study.”
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As Republicans embrace Big Government, they are becoming ‘Depublicans’ Would California voters actually support a wealth tax on billionaires? John Phillips: LA needs a dose of reality. Is Spencer Pratt the answer? California politicians wrongly fixate on education spending instead of results Laws protecting endangered plants are now endangering lives and property Instead of funding legitimate research that would benefit Americans or charitably using funds to help the sick and the poor of the world receive treatment, delusions in the mind of RFK Jr. are causing him to waste millions of our taxes for a study on an impoverished population that would fail to be approved in the US. By placing him at the head of HHS, Trump and the Republicans who confirmed him have empowered a madman to use the people in poor countries as lab rats to manufacture evidence for his conspiracy theories.Following the international uproar, there was some confusion about the status of the trials with an official at the Africa CDC claiming that the study was cancelled and an HHS official claiming that the study was “proceeding as planned” with work on the protocol ongoing. An “updated” protocol released last week by Inside Medicine will still withhold the vaccine from newborns who researchers know will be infected.
This is all happening in a faraway land, which may cause it to feel unimportant, particularly relative to all of the very real problems we face as individuals and as a nation. But as with other actions taken by the administration, our nation is losing its character as one that generally attempts to do good in the world.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at [email protected].
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