Kennedy recently funded a $1.6 million, 14,000-person study in Guinea-Bissau set to begin in early 2026. Investigators will divide 14,000 newborns into two groups. One group will receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, as recommended by the WHO. The other group won’t receive the vaccine until 6 weeks of age, a continuation of the woefully substandard care that has put so many children in Guinea-Bissau at risk. Because it is unethical and cruel, this study could never be performed in the United States.
In addition to exposing children needlessly to a potentially fatal infection, RFK Jr. has manipulated the study to support his unsupportable, science-resistant beliefs about harms caused by the hepatitis B vaccine:
• The study will not be examining the efficacy of early or late vaccination, as it is clear that there is no value in delaying a hepatitis B vaccine, especially in a child whose mother is infected. RFK Jr. would prefer not to know that he is exposing children to unnecessary risk.
• The study will be conducted over 5 years. Children who are infected with hepatitis B virus at birth don’t develop chronic liver disease for decades. Therefore, RFK Jr. is unlikely to know about how much harm his “study” has done during the 5-year period.
• The study is single-blinded. This means that investigators will know whether children received a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine, but the parents won’t know. This allows for investigator bias, where the investigator might find vague neurodevelopmental problems in the birth-dose group but not the 6-week group.
• RFK Jr. bypassed the standard bidding process so that he could choose his own investigators. He picked Peter Aaby and Christine Benn. Benn has several ties to the anti-vaccine movement in the United States. In 2018, Aaby and Been published a study claiming that the DTP vaccine had caused the premature deaths of young girls in Guinea-Bissau. In a subsequent paper, they recanted their findings.
• It is unlikely that parents will be asked to sign a consent form outlining the real risks of being in the 6-week vaccine group. As this study is funded by the American taxpayer through money provided by the CDC, the U.S. Congress should insist on seeing the details of the study, including the consent form.
In the next few months, as many as 7,000 children born in a country with a high-risk of hepatitis B infection early in life will be denied a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine. Many of these children will have shortened, difficult lives as a result. Who will step forward to protect these children whom RFK Jr. considers expendable? When, pray tell, will someone in power stand up to this man. But we remain silent, much as we did during the Tuskegee experiment when we considered African American sharecroppers in rural Alabama expendable. Now it’s children in a resource-poor country. To quote W. H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles, “They were small and could not hope for help, and no help came.”
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Additionally from the NYT:
In the meantime, the Food and Drug Administration is angling to make an even bigger and more enduring impact on Americans’ access to vaccines. After claiming, without presenting a shred of proof, that Covid vaccines played a role in the death of 10 children, top officials at the agency have proposed a roster of new requirements for the shots, including several that critics say would be logistically impossible and could leave us with no F.D.A.-approved Covid or flu vaccines…
Changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program could also seriously undermine vaccine access. The program, which compensates people who suffer rare side effects from certain vaccines, was established in 1988 after a tidal wave of lawsuits threatened to drive vaccine makers from the American market. If Mr. Kennedy decides to exempt any shot that falls under the fuzzy rubric of “shared clinical decision making” from this program — and if nobody stops him — vaccine makers may once again threaten to leave the U.S. market.
Mr. Kennedy could also drive those companies away by adding autism to the list of conditions for which they are potentially liable. (Decades of research has debunked the assertion that vaccines cause autism. But Mr. Kennedy and his supporters have proved astoundingly impervious to that evidence.) “They will stop selling vaccines here,” Dr. Havers said. “And regardless of what ACIP says, regardless of what F.D.A. says, regardless of what your doctor says, and regardless of what you actually want, if companies don’t sell them, people can’t get them.”
We don’t have to wonder what that future will look like. We can glimpse it already in communities across the country where measles and whooping cough are resurgent and where infants and young children have already died from both. We can also see it foretold in the current flu season: This year’s flu vaccine has proved an imperfect match to the currently circulating strains. New shots, based on mRNA technology, would have one day enabled us to avoid this kind of misfire. But the nation’s leaders have imperiled that future with the decisions they made this year.
It should not surprise anyone that 2025 — when the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer rose to the highest health office in the land — is ending with our vaccine policies in disarray and our access to vaccines increasingly imperiled.
Mr. Kennedy has brought us to this precipice by aggressively subverting nearly every process and protocol that previously governed our public health institutions. He has granted political appointees enormous sway over agency scientists. He has excluded people with meaningful expertise from his planning and deliberations. And he has fired dissenters all the way up to the C.D.C. director and replaced them with lackeys, sycophants and wellness grifters.
The relentless norm-shattering is not just a byproduct of Mr. Kennedy’s larger plans; it is a central feature. Bureaucratic changes to arcane and acronym-laden programs are easy to overlook or forget after a brief flash of indignation, especially in a world saturated with bleak, worrisome headlines. But it’s through that overlooking that we may eventually lose vaccines altogether.
Vaccines are a triumph of human ingenuity, modern medicine and public health. With them, we have beaten back smallpox, chickenpox, yellow fever, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, Covid, meningitis and more. If Mr. Kennedy continues to force the nation down the course he’s now set, we will be left to explain to future generations how we came to abandon them.