When MAGA’s anti-vaxxers fund African research
Guinea-Bissau is a small country in West Africa (2.1 million inhabitants) classified among the twenty least developed countries in the world in terms of human development. 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 has been at the center of a controversy that has shaken the medical research community at the beginning of this year regarding the conduct of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). For a study of this type, especially one of modest size, the media coverage and the energy deployed by many scientists to make this situation known have been exceptional and deserve examination.
American pediatrician Paul Offit has called this study the “new Tuskegee,” invoking the specter of the city in Alabama where a clinical study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by doctors observing the evolution of syphilis in poor African American men, deliberately deprived of treatment. 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 a prejudice that could be avoided, and that it is fueled by a deep-rooted racism.
The randomized controlled trial was conducted by researchers from the Bandim Health Project, a research station established in 1978 in Guinea-Bissau by Danish researchers. It received $1.6 million in funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) led by Robert Kennedy. The study aims to randomly allocate 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau into two groups, to be vaccinated against hepatitis B at birth (intervention group), or not.
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