When anti-vax MAGA funds African research
Guinea-Bissau is a small country in West Africa (2.1 million inhabitants) that its human development index ranks among the twenty least developed countries on the planet. Maternal and infant mortality is high and primary health care is not accessible to all households. The country is particularly affected by the hepatitis B virus: nearly one in five people is infected.
This country was at the heart of a controversy that shook medical research at the start of the year around the conduct of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). For a study of this type, which is also quite modest, the media coverage and the energy deployed by many scientists to make this situation known were exceptional and deserve examination[1].
The American pediatrician Paul Offit spoke of “new Tuskegee” to describe this study, summoning the specter of this town in Alabama in which a clinical study was carried out between 1932 and 1972 by doctors observing the evolution of syphilis in poor African-American men deliberately deprived of treatment[2]. This historical parallel is based on the fact that the study is not based on a credible scientific basis, but on the deliberate exposure of a group of participants to harm that could be avoided, and that it is fueled by uninhibited racism.
The randomized controlled trial was designed by researchers at the Bandim Health Project, a research station established in 1978 in Guinea-Bissau by Danish researchers. It received US$1.6 million in funding from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) headed by Robert Kennedy. The study plans to randomly divide 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau into two groups, so that they are vaccinated against hepatitis B at birth (intervention group), or at
