This week, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most malicious plots was finally stopped when police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers who planned to conduct a hepatitis B vaccine trial that would have endangered thousands of newborns in Africa and condemned some of them to premature and agonizing deaths. The trial was to be funded with $1.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hopefully this marks the end of one of the most unethical research projects proposed in recent memory. (There’s a lot of competition there, by the way, with the National Institute of Justice’s recent announcement that it will fund $1 million in research into possible links between “gender dysphoria and violent crime.”) If you hadn’t heard about the Guinea-Bissau trial until now, you might be wondering why do I need to know about a crappy trial that’s now being canceled? To that, I would say: It’s important to pay attention to the kind of downright evil machinations that RFK Jr. is trying to pull off to advance his anti-vaccine agenda, because he’s very likely going to try to do something like that again.
It is largely for this reason that the trial in Guinea-Bissau has gone largely unnoticed – with the notable exception of continued media coverage in Guinea-Bissau. The Guardian And rolling stone– that’s because it would take place in Africa and on African children, a population who, although they do not live in the United States, have already become victims of our stupid and monstrous government doing stupid and monstrous things with our tax dollars. Anyway, here’s what happened. Sorry it’s so long. It’s a complex illness.
What was the specific hepatitis B trial funded by the CDC?
In January, a CDC employee disclosed the protocol to Inside Medicine. The principle of the trial was to discover the “non-specific effects” of the hepatitis B vaccine. What side effects? Skin disorders like rashes, so-called, as well as neurodevelopmental issues. This is a clear sign of why RFK Jr. finds the trial so appealing, given its promotion of the false link between vaccines and autism.
The West African country of Guinea-Bissau currently recommends the hepatitis B vaccine for all babies at six weeks due to access issues, but intends to roll out the vaccine universally at birth from 2027, in line with World Health Organization recommendations. The proposed trial would have given the hepatitis B vaccine to 7,000 newborns and withheld the vaccine from another 7,000 infants until they reached six weeks, ostensibly to study differences in their health outcomes. Does this sound familiar? It should; it’s not far from what happened at Tuskegee.
Guinea-Bissau is one of the countries most affected in the world by hepatitis B, a highly contagious virus that attacks the liver, leading to cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer. Nearly one in five people in the country suffer from chronic hepatitis B, a liver infection caused by the virus. About 90 percent of exposed newborns develop a chronic infection, and 25 percent of these children will eventually die from liver cancer or liver failure linked to hepatitis B. There is no cure.
Who are the Danish researchers who designed the study?
On December 18, 2025, the CDC announced it would award $1.6 million to a proposal from researchers at the University of Southern Denmark. The unsolicited grant reeks of cronyism, as RFK Jr. appears to have circumvented normal review standards to fund the study. The grant was awarded to Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby of the Bandim Health Project, a group that has operated in Guinea-Bissau since 1978 to study what it calls “nonspecific vaccine effects,” that is, any side effects of a vaccine that go beyond the disease it targets. If that sounds like anti-vax code language, it is, or at least that’s how it’s used here. Bandim Health Project says “non-live” vaccines – a group that includes mRNA vaccines and polio and rabies vaccines, which rely on pathogens that have been killed – can cause negative side effects.
As such, RFK Jr. is a long-time fan of the Danes. He called them “deities of vaccine research.” He cited Bandim’s work when he announced that the United States would cut more than $1 billion in funding for the international vaccine agency Gavi, which has vaccinated more than half of the world’s children in low-income countries. The specific article he cited was published in 2017 in The Lancet and analyzed approximately 1,000 children in Guinea-Bissau who had received the DTP vaccine, a highly effective vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. The Bandim study did not examine whether the DPT vaccine was effective, but rather whether the vaccine caused children to die from other causes. Although their analysis suggested that the side effects of the DPT vaccine were potentially dangerous, the study was incredibly flawed, according to NPR. The study draws on old data dating back to the early 1980s, when vaccines were not commonly administered and the overall risk of childhood death was much higher. Additionally, the DTP vaccine at the time was literally a different vaccine. Two of the researchers in the 2017 paper essentially redid the analysis using data from the 2010s and found that the vaccine had “no effect” on infant mortality.
In 2025, another group of Danish researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of all of Bandim’s research, which consisted of randomized trials involving thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau and Denmark which would demonstrate these “non-specific effects of the vaccine”. These Danes concluded that Bandim’s research was fundamentally flawed, pointing to results that supported their pre-existing theories and downplaying the fact that none of the trials actually confirmed the hypothesis they were intended to test. “It is worrying that such a large research group has conducted so many randomized trials over such a long period without finding any real results,” Henrik Støvring, one of the new Danes, said in a statement. This is important because Bandim’s Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby are responsible for about a third of all research on “nonspecific effects of vaccines,” and they have argued that their results show that the world needs to change its approach to vaccination.
Why does Bandim operate from Guinea-Bissau?
That’s a great question. Guinea-Bissau was colonized by the Portuguese Empire and not by the Danes. The Bandim Health Project website links to a podcast “telling the story of Peter Aaby’s arrival in Guinea-Bissau.” The podcast is hosted by Christine Stabell Benn and is called “Vaccine Curious.” I’m not going to listen, but you sure can. Plus, they’re married.
While colonialism did not directly bring these Danes to West Africa, it is at the heart of the entire Bandim exploitation project, in which Western researchers conduct unethical studies in Africa on African children, studies that would never be approved in Denmark on Danish children. Low- and middle-income countries have more limited access to health care and less power to influence the design of studies conducted on their populations, often without involving local researchers. And informed consent can be difficult to obtain in places like Guinea-Bissau due to language barriers and low literacy rates. This asymmetry of power is not only circumstantial to Bandim’s project; this allows it. As Melody Schreiber reported in March for The GuardianBandim operates like a leader, otherwise THE leading health organization in a country without public health infrastructure.
Were there any other problems with the proposed trial?
Inside Medicine physician Jeremy Faust pointed out many of the flaws in the trial design, which are too numerous to list here. But here are some of the most important ones. Although some side effects of vaccines, such as skin rashes, occur quickly after injection, the long-term benefits of vaccines, such as protection against liver cancer or cirrhosis, may not be apparent for decades. And people are more likely to develop these long-term effects if they contract hepatitis B as children. “It’s like doing a chemotherapy trial and asking if the patient is alive a week later,” Faust wrote.
Additionally, none of the hepatitis B vaccines used in the trial were approved by the FDA, raising the question of why the CDC would fund research on vaccines that were not available in the United States.
One of the most extraordinary ethical violations, according to David Boulware, an infectious disease physician at the University of Minnesota, was that the researchers did not plan to screen the mothers for hepatitis B. Given that nearly a fifth of Guinea-Bissau’s population carries hepatitis B, this essentially guaranteed that many of the vaccine-refused children in the study would contract the disease from their mothers, condemning them to a shorter life. “It is unthinkable to consign 1,425 infants to almost certain (70-90%) hepatitis B infection (and resulting chronic liver disease),” Boulware wrote in Inside Medicine.
In summary: the trial planned to deny an effective and historically proven life-saving intervention to thousands of children without any scientifically valid justification.
How was this study approved??
Excellent question. Experts have argued that the study violates the Declaration of Helsinki, a set of ethical standards for human research that requires researchers to provide participants with the best medical care, not just what is standard.
After the protocol was leaked in January and sparked international outrage, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was canceling the study. Guinea-Bissau’s new health minister – a transitional military government is in place after the coup – confirmed the trial had been “cancelled or suspended”. In February, the WHO director-general said it would be “unethical to continue this study.” Meanwhile, however, U.S. officials…
Gn Health
