“The men were not informed of the nature of the study, proper treatment was withheld, and more than 100 died as a result.”
According to Wikipedia:
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African American men with syphilis as well as a control group without. The purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, to the point of death and autopsy. Although there had been effective treatments to reduce the severity of the disease since the 1920s, the use of penicillin for the treatment of syphilis was widespread as of 1945. The men were not informed of the nature of the study, proper treatment was withheld, and more than 100 died as a result…
None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis. The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients’ wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
“Since the introduction of universal newborn hepatitis B vaccine in the United States, vertical transmission rates have declined by 94%-98%.”
The core sin of the Tuskegee Experiment was withholding a proven treatment for a devastating infection for “research” purposes, and like penicillin, the hepatitis B vaccine is tried, true, and tested. According to the article The History of Hepatitis B Vaccines and the Importance of Universal Vaccination in Infancy:
The first hepatitis B vaccine, Heptavax, was plasma-derived and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1981. It was used in targeted populations of high-risk individuals, including infants born to infected mothers. In 1986, the FDA approved the first recombinant vaccine, Recombivax HB. This vaccine was derived from yeast and was used for the same high-risk populations.
In 1989, a second recombinant vaccine was approved, Engerix-B. Unfortunately, the targeted vaccination strategy did not have an impact on reducing the overall incidence of the disease. Efforts to identify high-risk individuals were further complicated by data that showed 35%-65% of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) positive mothers had no identifiable high-risk factors. Vertical (mother-to-child) transmission was the most common route of infection. Approximately 90% of babies born to mothers with hepatitis B become infected, and an estimated 25%-40% die prematurely in adulthood due to complications such as cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma. This led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to recommend the vaccine for all newborns, starting in 1991.
Since the introduction of universal newborn hepatitis B vaccine in the United States, vertical transmission rates have declined by 94%-98%.
Not bad.
The article further explained the rationale for giving the dose at birth:
While hepatitis B screening is recommended for all pregnant individuals by the CDC and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), only 82%-86% have the screening performed, and just 35% of those who test positive receive all recommended follow-up care. This leaves a gap for 2.9-3.1 million infants per year who are born to mothers not screened for hepatitis B. The universal hepatitis B vaccine dose serves as a critical safety net, providing protection to infants born to hepatitis B infected mothers who were not identified at the time of delivery.
In addition to being effective, the vaccine is safe. A recent review titled Hepatitis B Vaccination at Birth: Safety, Effectiveness, and Public Health Benefit found:
A comprehensive review of safety data from randomized and nonrandomized clinical trials, cohort studies, national vaccine safety monitoring programs, and systematic GRADE analyses demonstrated that the hepatitis B vaccine is safe and well-tolerated in all age groups.
“You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis.”
Despite this decades-long track record of proven success, MAHA/MAGA disinformation agents want us to pretend none of that evidence exists. They claim we need to start over with a new randomized-controlled trial (RCT) of the vaccine using children in Guinea-Bissau, a country with an extremely high prevalence of hepatitis B. They argue that “many physicians don’t understand clinical trial ethics” and this new trial is “ethical, feasible, practical and would be quite useful“.
Jonathan Jarry called this deliberate ignorance the square one fallacy, and Dr. David Gorski discussed this proposed trial last year in his article MAHA’s New Tuskegee Experiment. Its fate has gone back and forth, even this week alone, and the latest update is that health authorities in Guinea-Bissau are refusing to let their children be used for unnecessary research. Let’s hope that’s the end of it.
However, even if this trial never gets off the ground, it is worth discussing how it was even considered in the first place and to recognize that once again, White scientists are seeking to exploit Black bodies for unethical medical experiments.
According to a recent article by Melody Schreiber titled Controversial Vaccine Trial Touted by RFK Jr Gets Go-Ahead in Guinea-Bissau:
A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week… It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.
At an anti-vaccine conference last month, Kennedy praised the Danish researchers behind the trial and touted US-supported research on hepatitis B in newborns as exemplifying the Trump administration’s agenda for vaccines, which has included slashing vaccine recommendations and casting doubt on the safety and effectiveness of shots.
She further described the proposed experiment.
Danish researchers plan to enroll 14,000 infants in Guinea-Bissau in the trial, giving the hepatitis B vaccine to half of the babies at birth and withholding it from the others for the first six weeks of life…
The researchers will now test mothers for hepatitis B before they give birth. The babies of mothers who test positive will be given the vaccine and will not be included in the trial. But the babies of mothers whose tests are negative may be enrolled. The new protocol has not been shared publicly.
In previous research, half of children who contracted hepatitis B did so after birth, through community exposures. “This virus can be transmitted casually,” Offit said. It can live on surfaces for up to seven days, and it can be acquired by sharing washcloths, toothbrushes and fingernail clippers. In addition, the hepatitis B test has a 5% false negative rate, which could provide false assurance that a birthing parent does not have the virus.
She quoted vaccine-experts who were rightly appalled by this trial:
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?”
“Experts have decried the African experiment as ‘horribly unethical and cruel‘, ‘neo-colonialist‘ and ‘damaging‘,” she reported.
She further revealed:
An ethics committee at the researchers’ home institution of the University of Southern Denmark voted this week to proceed with the trial, and officials in Guinea-Bissau have also greenlit the project, which the health minister, Quinhin Nantote, initially said was suspended after international uproar earlier this year.
Stig Børsen Hansen, a founding member who was one of two reviewers who presented the study to the Danish committee, resigned from the group in protest on Friday, citing major ethical issues with the study.
“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”.
Three other members of the committee have also resigned in protest.
Ms. Schreiber also reported that while the CDC planned to spend $1.6 million on this study:
It would cost approximately $13,200 to buy enough vaccines through Unicef and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to immunize all newborns in Guinea-Bissau each year, Delawalla (a researcher and founder and CEO of the non-profit Stand Up for Science) pointed out.
Everyone involved should work together to ensure that every baby in Guinea-Bissau receives the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccination, she added. “This is not muddy water: we can use Black babies to further pseudoscience or we can save children’s lives with a 20-cent shot.”
“It is a red flag when people don’t report the primary result of a randomized trial.”
While this study would be abhorrent even if was carried about by credible researchers, that is not the case here. According to one article on the lead researchers, Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby:
Stabell Benn and Aaby are currently under investigation by Danish authorities over allegations of “falsification” and “scientific misconduct” related to previous vaccine research.
According to an article titled Controversial Danish Vaccine Research Group Faces New Allegations:
A new paper levels fresh allegations of questionable scientific practices by the Bandim Health Project (BHP), an embattled group led by researchers in Denmark that has long studied vaccines in West Africa and has recently become influential in U.S. health policy…
Benn’s group has been criticized in the past for what other researchers say are poor reporting practices—accusations her team denies. In a paper published today in Vaccine, researchers allege problems at BHP go deeper. The authors say they were unable to find comprehensive data on primary outcomes—the effects a trial was designed to investigate—for 10 of the group’s studies carried out over 2 decades. Together, the studies included tens of thousands of Bissau-Guinean children.
The article continued:
“It is a red flag when people don’t report the primary result of a randomized trial,” says Evan Mayo-Wilson, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health who was not involved in the new study. “We have an ethical obligation to participants in randomized trials to report the results for the research questions that those trials were designed to answer.”
Benn, who is affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, told Science the new paper is “substantially flawed in both content and interpretation,” but that she did not have time to respond in detail today.
Another article titled Randomized Trials Show no Evidence of Non-Specific Vaccine Effects said:
For more than three decades, researchers Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby from the Bandim Health Project have conducted randomized trials involving thousands of children in Guinea-Bissau and Denmark to demonstrate so-called non-specific vaccine effects – that is, whether vaccines also protect against diseases other than the one they are designed to prevent.
A new comprehensive Danish review now shows that the trials have been unable to demonstrate non-specific effects for the widely used vaccinations against measles, tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough.
“It is concerning that such a prominent research group has conducted so many randomized trials over such a long period without finding real results. Randomized trials are normally considered the gold standard in medical research, so if they do not show anything, one should be very cautious about presenting it as convincing evidence,” says Henrik Støvring from Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus and Aarhus University, who led the new review.
Given this inglorious track record, it’s no surprise that:
Kennedy has repeatedly praised their work, which he says shows that after vaccination, “you can have mass injuries, and catastrophic injuries, and they’re hiding in plain sight.”
“I didn’t want to believe it.”
The Tuskegee Experiment ended only after it was exposed by a 28-year-old whistle-blower, Peter Buxton, who said:
I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.
I had a similar reaction when I learned about the Tuskegee Experiment as a naïve youth, and Buxton’s bravery only raises the question of why no one spoke up sooner. How could such an atrocity be allowed to happen?
Today at least, I no longer have to wonder about such things. I just have to read the news and recognize that the cowards and sycophants who enabled, promoted, and normalized MAHA in any way are collectively to blame for its attempt to do Tuskegee 2.0.