Judicial police in Guinea-Bissau searched the offices of the Bandim Health Project on Monday and seized doses of hepatitis B vaccine, as The Guardian’s Melody Schreiber reports, though police stressed the seizure didn’t signal problems with the vaccines’ quality or safety.
The research group, which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly praised, is at the center of a fight over a $3.2 million trial on African newborns, half of it funded by the CDC.
Even after a summer redesign, the study would withhold hepatitis B vaccine from 7,000 newborns during their first six weeks of life, in a country where roughly one in five adults carries the virus. Chronic infection kills 15% to 25% of those who have it. A dose within 24 hours of birth is safe and highly effective.
Bandim has posted an approval letter from Guinea-Bissau’s national ethics committee, and a Danish ethics committee signed off earlier this month. But Quinhin Nantote, health minister of the country’s transitional government, flatly denied the trial would go ahead: “This is not even remotely true.”
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The World Health Organization isn’t on board either. Any study denying participants the vaccine is “unethical and exposes newborns to serious and potentially irreversible harm,” said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević.
Kennedy has called Bandim founder Peter Aaby and co-leader Christine Stabell Benn “the deities of vaccine research.” Stabell Benn also sat on the ACIP hepatitis B working group that presented evidence before the committee voted to end the universal birth-dose recommendation. The researchers didn’t respond to The Guardian’s questions.
Colette Delawalla, founder of the nonprofit Stand Up for Science, said the raid underscores that Guinea-Bissau, which saw a military coup less than a year ago, lacks the stability clinical trials require. “Guinea-Bissau is in the difficult situation of trying to protect their youth, their future, from exploitation by two powerful western nations and they are using what leverage they have to do so,” she said.
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