This week, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most malevolent plots was finally brought to a halt when police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers who intended to carry out a hepatitis B vaccine trial that would have endangered thousands of newborn children in Africa and condemned some of them to an early, agonizing death. The trial was to be funded with $1.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This hopefully marks the end one of the most unethical research projects proposed in recent memory. (There is, by the way, some stiff competition there, what 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 had not heard of the Guinea-Bissau trial until now, you might be thinking, well, why do I need to know about a shitty trial that is now cancelled? To that I would say: It’s important to pay attention to the kind of straightforwardly evil machinations 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 this again.
A huge part of the reason the Guinea-Bissau trial has flown largely under the radar—with the notable exception of ongoing coverage at The Guardian and Rolling Stone—is because it would take place in Africa and on African children, a population that, despite not living in the U.S., has already become a casualty of our stupid and monstrous government doing stupid and monstrous things with our tax dollars. So anyway, here is what happened. Sorry it is so long. It is intricately evil.
What was the specific hepatitis B trial that the CDC funded?
In January, a CDC employee leaked the protocol to Inside Medicine. The trial’s premise was to find the “non-specific effects” of the hepatitis B vaccine. What side effects? Skin disorders like rashes, supposedly, as well as neurodevelopmental conditions. That was a clear sign of why RFK Jr. finds the trial so appealing, given his promotion of the false link between vaccines and autism.
The West African nation 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 starting in 2027, in line with World Health Organization recommendations. The proposed trial would have given hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 newborns and withheld the vaccines from another 7,000 infants until they reached six weeks, ostensibly to study the differences between their health outcomes. Does this sound familiar? It should; it’s not far off from what happened at Tuskegee.
Guinea-Bissau has one of the world’s highest burdens of 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 have chronic hepatitis B, a liver infection caused by the virus. Around 90 percent of newborns who are exposed develop a chronic infection, and 25 percent of those children will eventually die of hepatitis B-related liver cancer or liver failure. There is no cure.
Who are the Danish researchers who designed the study?
On Dec. 18, 2025, the CDC announced it would award a $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 bypassed 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 “non-specific effects of vaccines,” meaning any side effects of a vaccine that go beyond the disease it targets. If this sounds like coded anti-vax language, it is, or at least that’s how it’s being used here. Bandim Health Project claims that “non-live” vaccines—a group that includes mRNA vaccines and vaccines for polio and rabies, which rely on pathogens that have been killed—can cause negative side effects.
As such, RFK Jr. is a longtime fan of the Danes. He has called them “deities of vaccine research.” He cited Bandim’s work when he announced the U.S. would cut more than a billion dollars of funding to the international vaccine agency Gavi, which has vaccinated more than half the world’s children in lower-income countries. The specific paper he cited was published in 2017 in The Lancet and analyzed around 1,000 children in Guinea-Bissau who had received the DTP vaccine, a highly effective vaccine which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The Bandim study did not investigate whether the DTP vaccine was effective, but rather if the vaccine caused children to die from other causes. Although their analysis suggested that the side effects of the DTP vaccine were potentially dangerous, the study was incredibly flawed, per NPR. It relied on ancient data that dated to the early 1980s, when vaccines were not commonly given and the general risk of infant death was much higher. Moreover, the DTP vaccine back then was literally a different vaccine. Two of the researchers on the 2017 paper essentially redid the analysis using data from the 2010s and found the vaccine had “no effects” on child mortality.
In 2025, a different group of researchers from Denmark conducted a comprehensive analysis of all of Bandim’s research, which consists of randomized trials involving thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau and Denmark that allegedly demonstrate these “non-specific vaccine effects.” Those Danes concluded that the Bandim’s research was fundamentally flawed, highlighting results that supported their preexisting theories and downplaying the fact that none of the trials actually confirmed the hypothesis that they were supposed to test. “It is concerning that such a prominent research group has conducted so many randomized trials over such a long period without finding real results,” Henrik Støvring, one of the new Danes, said in a statement. This matters because Bandim’s Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby are responsible for about one-third of all research on “non-specific vaccine effects,” and they have argued that their results show that the world needs to change its approach to vaccination.
Why does Bandim operate out of Guinea-Bissau?
This is an excellent question. Guinea-Bissau was colonized by the Portuguese Empire, not the Danish. The Bandim Health Project website links to a podcast “telling the story of how Peter Aaby came to Guinea-Bissau.” The podcast is hosted by Christine Stabell Benn and is called “Vaccine Curious.” I’m not going to listen, but you certainly can. Also, they are married.
If colonialism did not directly bring these Danes to West Africa, it is at the heart of Bandim’s entire, exploitative project, in which researchers from the West 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 healthcare and less power to influence research design of the studies that are carried out on their people, often without involving local researchers. And informed consent can be hard to obtain in places like Guinea-Bissau because of language barriers and low literacy rates. This asymmetry of power is not just circumstantial to Bandim’s project; it enables it. As Melody Schreiber reported in March for The Guardian, Bandim operates as a leading, if not the leading, health organization in a country without public health infrastructure.
Were there any other problems with the proposed trial?
Physician Jeremy Faust at Inside Medicine outlined many of the flaws of the trial’s design, which are too numerous to list here. But here are some of the big ones. While some side effects of vaccines, like rashes, occur quickly after the shot, the long-term benefits of vaccines, such as protection against liver cancer or cirrhosis, might not be apparent for decades. And people are more likely to develop these long-term effects if they get hepatitis B as children. “It’s like doing a trial of chemotherapy and asking if the patient is alive a week later,” Faust wrote.
Moreover, none of the the hepatitis B vaccines used in the trial were approved by the FDA, raising the question why the CDC would fund research on vaccines that were not available to people in the U.S.
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 the population of Guinea-Bissau carry hepatitis B, this basically guaranteed that many of the children denied the vaccine in the study would get the disease from their mothers, condemning them to shorter lives. “To consign 1,425 infants to almost certain (70%-90%) Hepatitis B infection (and the chronic liver disease that eventually follows) is unthinkable,” Boulware wrote in Inside Medicine.
In sum: The trial planned to withhold an effective, historically proven, life-saving intervention from thousands of children with no scientifically valid justification.
How did this study ever get approved?
Great question. Experts have argued that the study violates the Helsinki declaration, a set of ethical standards for human research that require researchers to provide participants with the best medical care, not just what is standard.
After the protocol leaked in January and sparked international outrage, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the study was cancelled. The newly appointed minister of health in Guinea-Bissau—there is a transitional military government in place following the coup—confirmed the trial was “cancelled or suspended.” In February, the director-general of the WHO said it would be “unethical to proceed with this study.” During this time, however, officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services insisted the trial would continue as planned, additionally calling the Africa CDC “a powerless, fake organization.” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation pledged an additional $1.8 million to the study, per Rolling Stone.
Still, the trial appeared to be suspended. In March, the Støvring-led group of Danish researchers critical of Bandim published a new paper in Vaccine that detailed several instances in which the Bandim group conducted studies and then released partial results or no results at all. All fell quiet through the rest of spring, and then summer, and I assumed the trial was dead in a ditch.
Then on Oct. 7, Rolling Stone reported that the trial was back on. An ethics committee at the University of Southern Denmark voted to proceed with the study, although four members of said committee resigned in protest, citing ethical qualms about the study. “You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis,” Stig Børsen Hansen, one reviewer who quit, told The Guardian.
The newly approved trial had changed its protocol; the Danish researchers now planned to test the mothers for hepatitis B before they gave birth, and the infants of mothers who test positive would be given the vaccine and excluded from the trial. But babies born to mothers who test negative would be enrolled in the trial, giving them a 50 percent chance of not getting the vaccine. This is worrisome because Hepatitis B is easily transmitted from person to person, as the virus can live on nail clippers and toothbrushes—and the test for hepatitis B has a 5 percent false negative rate.
So even the newly revised trial is still not ethical.
No. It would still deny vaccines to 7,000 newborns for the first six weeks of their life. And, as Schreiber explained in The Guardian, the mothers who would have declined to participate in the study would not have received vaccines, making informed consent impossible. Joining the trial would give your child a 50 percent chance of getting vaccinated, and opting out would give your child a zero percent of getting vaccinated.
Then what happened?
On Oct. 19, the Guinea-Bissau police force announced on Facebook that it had raided the Bandim Health Project’s offices and seized the doses of hepatitis B vaccines. The post was accompanied by a snazzy graphic: “Apreendido Vacinas—Hepatite B”! Two days later, the transitional government of Guinea-Bissau announced it would not authorize the trial, cancelling it, hopefully for good.
Why can’t Guinea-Bissau start universal hepatitis B vaccination now? Why wait?
The country, which, again, just experienced a coup, is strapped for resources. As Faust wrote in Inside Science, the $1.6 million the CDC invested in this sham of a trial could have funded a decade’s worth of hepatitis B vaccines for newborns in Guinea-Bissau, ensuring every person born in the country will be protected from unnecessary disease and death as soon as possible. It is unclear, and I wager, unlikely, that the CDC will now redirect that money to be used in this way.
What does this mean for RFK Jr.?
RFK Jr. has made it clear that he wants to end the universal practice of immunizing newborns against hepatitis B in the U.S. In Dec. 2025, he and his hand-picked committee of vaccine advisers voted to end the practice, instead recommending that parents decide for themselves, and give the vaccine only after their child is at least two months old. This recommendation was blocked by a judge, but a lawsuit is ongoing, meaning the two-month vaccine deferral still might happen.
On Oct. 20, researchers published a paper that predicted that altering current American immunization practices would place more than half of Americans at risk of contracting hepatitis B by age 20, per the New York Times. Another paper out this week finds that 1.3 percent of 158,000 children who lived with a Kaiser Permanente Northern California member were exposed to hepatitis B. The Guinea-Bissau trial might be over, but RFK Jr.’s campaign to spread hepatitis B to the masses is not.