RFK Jr’s anti-vax gamble with African babies’ lives is an experiment in cruelty

To anyone not paying close attention, the announcement of a new vaccine trial in the west African country of Guinea-Bissau sounds like it must be a rare piece of good news against an often-bleak backdrop.

Researchers want to run a clinical trial on an infant vaccine against Hepatitis B, an incurable condition that affects almost one in five adults in that nation – and which is often fatal in those it affects.

When Hepatitis B kills, it can do so gruesomely: most commonly through cirrhosis of the liver, or liver cancer. Without comprehensive and top-quality medical and hospice care – which is often lacking in a country like Guinea-Bissau – either is a truly agonising and awful way to die.

So, you would think anything that might prevent newborn babies from catching Hepatitis B from their mothers would be hailed as a medical miracle. The reality, though, is a little different: this vaccine was developed in the 1970s, and has been licensed since the 1980s. We know it is safe, and that it is effective.

Why, then, would you run a ‘trial’ on a vaccine that we already know works? The answer leads all the way back to the US health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr – whose department is funding a trial that seems certain to doom infants on the other side of the planet, in service of Kennedy’s deluded decades-long campaign against vaccinations.

The question the trial is designed to test is whether or not there are unnoticed side effects caused by giving the vaccine to babies within hours of their birth, which is the current protocol.

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The reason it is given in this way is clear: without vaccination, around 14 in every 100 babies born of mothers with Hepatitis B will develop chronic hepatitis themselves. If babies receive a vaccine at birth, with routine doses as follow-ups, that drops to just four in 100. But without that birth shot, the rate almost doubles, to around seven to eight per 100.

Neither the US funders nor the Danish researchers who want to conduct this trial dispute – at least in public – that the Hep B vaccine works. Their claim is that they want to check whether it might have additional side effects that decades of previous trials have not picked up, particularly with regard to that dose given right at birth.

This is a common tactic of anti-vaccine groups, because it presents as reasonable: what’s so wrong about just checking something is safe? What do vaccine advocates have to hide? In reality, they ignore any study that shows it’s safe, conducting more and more in the hope that one will bring up something they can use.

And trialling vaccines doesn’t come without human cost. A randomised controlled trial requires a large group of people to not get the treatment – meaning that babies in a country where one in five mothers has Hep B would be denied a working, lifesaving treatment, just to satisfy the curiosity of RFK Jr and his anti-vaccine followers.

There is no reason this trial has to be held in Guinea-Bissau: given it is not testing the effectiveness of the vaccine, only its supposed side effects, this unnecessary trial could be done anywhere in the world, where the consequences of denying Hep B vaccination at birth would not be so dire.

If RFK Jr and his coterie – or the Danish researchers they’ve funded – were so determined to check this vaccine for side effects, they could do this research in Denmark, or in the USA. Instead, they’ve decided to conduct their grim and deadly experiment where it would do the most harm imaginable.

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There has been, predictably enough, a backlash to this experiment: reports suggest the government of Guinea-Bissau has denied permission for the trial to happen. After an earlier attempt to conduct this trial failed, the protocol was redesigned to try to exclude babies born of mothers known to have Hep B.

But no amount of fiddling or redesigning can work: this is unnecessary medical experimentation – involving withdrawal of lifesaving care – on babies, born halfway around the world. RFK Jr is clearly sincere in his anti-vaccine crusade, which is part of why he should never have been confirmed in office as the man running huge swathes of the US healthcare system, as well as much of its medical research.

This is an experiment that could condemn babies born this year to an agonising, awful death from cirrhosis, for no discernible medical benefit. RFK Jr’s team is hoping that because it’s been proposed in Guinea-Bissau, Americans won’t notice. It is vital that we all pay attention.