Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last June fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and restacked it with anti-vaccine allies. In December, his ACIP voted 8-3 to gut a 34-year-old recommendation that all American newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth — a policy that had reduced pediatric infections by 99% and prevented an estimated 90,100 childhood deaths.
The cruelty, it burns.
During deliberations, ACIP members dismissed hepatitis B victims as “largely a disease of sex workers, drug users, and immigrants.”
Two days after the CDC adopted their recommendation, the Federal Register announced a $1.6 million unsolicited, non-competitive grant to run a trial of that same vaccine on 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau.
Not in Denmark, where the lead researchers live. No, that’s where the rich white kids live.
Not in the United States, where the policy was just changed. No, rich white kids there too.
In Guinea-Bissau because it has a poverty rate 60%, hepatitis B prevalence 19%, and most importantly believed to have no leverage to refuse. This study could never pass an institutional review board in America. Everyone involved knows that.
The entire point was to do it somewhere the subjects can’t fight back, then use the results to demolish vaccine policy everywhere else.
They are literally trying to cook a precedent by denying vaccines to infants, based on their race.
Mengele much?
Who Gets Experimented On
The architecture is not new. Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service knowingly withheld antibiotics from hundreds of Black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama — not to learn something unknown, but to watch what a known disease does when you let it run. Paul Offit called the Guinea-Bissau trial “RFK Jr.’s Tuskegee Experiment.” An active CDC employee who leaked the study protocol to Inside Medicine used the same comparison.
The parallel is obvious: a U.S. government agency deliberately withholding a proven intervention from a population selected for its poverty and powerlessness, to study outcomes that are already known.
Ninety percent of babies exposed to hepatitis B at birth develop chronic infection. A quarter of those children will die of liver cancer or liver failure. The hepatitis B vaccine, given within 24 hours of delivery, prevents this. That is not a hypothesis. It is settled medicine backed by four decades of data and over 1.4 billion administered doses. The WHO recommends universal birth dosing. Guinea-Bissau was planning to implement it in 2027.
The infamously immoral Bandim researchers — Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby, based at the University of Southern Denmark — called that gap between current practice and planned policy a “window of opportunity.” Their study randomizes half the babies to get the vaccine. The other half don’t. In a country where one in five people is a carrier. Without screening pregnant mothers. The WHO condemned it:
Exploiting scarcity is not ethical.
White European researchers, funded by the American government, experimenting on Black African newborns with a vaccine they would never withhold from white children at home. That is the “study”.
Like taking candy from a baby.
Rigged by Design
The trial measures mortality at 42 days and tracks “non-specific effects” — skin rashes, neurodevelopmental issues — for up to five years. But hepatitis B kills through cirrhosis and liver cancer, which take decades to develop. As Jeremy Faust noted, it’s like running a chemotherapy trial and checking if the patient is alive a week later. The study cannot detect the vaccine’s benefits. It can only detect short-term adverse events. That is the point.
The single-blind design means researchers know which babies were vaccinated — what the WHO called “a significant likelihood of substantial risk of bias.” None of the vaccines are FDA-approved. The results won’t apply to American children. Kennedy’s CDC is paying $1.6 million for a study designed to produce one specific result: no measurable benefit from the birth dose. That result will then be cited to justify the domestic policy change that was already made two days before the study was funded.
Policy first. Manufactured evidence to follow, so even more children can be harmed.
The Machine
Kennedy cited Bandim’s 2017 study — claiming the DTP vaccine killed girls in Guinea-Bissau — to slash over a billion dollars in global vaccine funding. Bandim later failed to replicate those findings. A November 2025 analysis in Vaccine found that Bandim authored roughly 35% of all published clinical research on vaccine “non-specific effects.” Stabell Benn advised the new ACIP and collaborated with Tracy Beth Hoeg, a senior FDA official who previously worked at the University of Southern Denmark. The ACIP cited Bandim research in its September 2025 presentations, then voted to gut the birth dose, then the CDC funded Bandim to produce the next round of evidence.
The CDC is paying the people who generate the data Kennedy uses to dismantle vaccine policy to generate more data Kennedy can use to dismantle vaccine policy. Using African babies as the raw material.
Offit’s suggestion was simple: take the $1.6 million and vaccinate as many newborns as you can. CIDRAP reported that amount could fund Guinea-Bissau’s birth dose for over a decade. Instead, the money buys a study whose lead researchers have documented credibility problems, awarded without competition, in a country that just had a coup, with an ethics approval that Guinea-Bissau’s own health minister says may never have actually occurred.
Guinea-Bissau suspended the study in January. Because they see what Trump is, especially in context of a coup. The WHO condemned it in February. Because they see what Trump is. Three members of Congress called it “abhorrent.” Because they see what Trump is. HHS responded in a deranged rant calling the Africa CDC a “powerless, fake organization” and insisting the trial would proceed as planned no matter what anyone says.
The Bandim team’s official response drips with unaccountable privilege:
We welcome continued discussion.
The guy with his hand in the cookie jar says keep talking while he keeps taking.
The technology changes. The architecture doesn’t. Tuskegee proved that federal science can be turned against the people it claims to serve when those running it decide certain populations are expendable. The CDC was built to prevent disease. Under Kennedy, it is manufacturing pretexts to let disease run — and choosing whose children pay the price.