Trump administration’s abuse of Africa continues with vaccine study

A disturbing vaccine experiment backed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been facing accusations of eugenics and has garnered comparisons to the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiment — yet it’s moving forward in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

So continues the Trump administration’s fundamentally racist strategy when it comes to Africa , a continent the president and his allies have sought to exploit and strip of its resources, from precious minerals to health data .

I wrote about the Kennedy-backed experiment — in which thousands of African infants are to be denied the hepatitis B vaccine for the first six weeks after birth — back in January. Around that time, it was suspended by African officials amid outrage over the project’s ethics and its similarities with eugenics and the deadly Tuskegee experiment, which saw hundreds of Black men denied syphilis treatment for decades in the name of medical experimentation, starting in the 1930s.

To be clear, questions about the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns have already been asked and answered in the affirmative by reputable scientists.

Regardless, The Guardian reported that the experiment, which is funded partly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, moved forward last week after gaining approval from the ethics committee overseeing the Danish researchers conducting the study. Several committee members resigned in protest after the vote, including founding member Stig Børsen Hansen, who told the outlet:

“You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis,” Hansen said. The children who are randomly selected not to receive the birth dose of the vaccine, those who “lost the lottery,” face in their earliest days the risk of contracting hepatitis B, which can cause irreversible lifelong damage. “They contract hepatitis B in the context of being part of a research project,” Hansen said, which made their infection happen, in effect, “by design.”

The outlet also quotes an infectious disease doctor as saying Kennedy is effectively taking advantage of African children:

Kennedy “wants to make it so we don’t use a birth dose here in this country,” said Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That’s the goal.”

Kennedy would never be able to do the trial in the US because of its significant ethical concerns, Offit added. “He’s taking advantage of a developing country … Is it because children in Africa are more expendable than children here?”

Offit’s skepticism about the bias that appears to be at the heart of this study is well-earned. Kennedy has faced criticism for peddling racist pseudoscience before — including last year, when Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., took him to task for claiming that Black people have different immune systems and therefore shouldn’t be on the same vaccine schedule as white people. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a top infectious disease expert who resigned from the CDC last year, said in his resignation letter that eugenics “plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated” at Kennedy’s agency.

Spending American tax dollars to run a potentially deadly experiment on African babies obviously isn’t going to dispel those allegations.

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