The Guinea-Bissau Vaccine Raid That Stopped a U.S.-Backed Trial

A Police Raid in a West African Capital

On October 19, 2025, police officers walked into the offices of the Bandim Health Project in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, and seized vials of hepatitis B vaccine. The next day, the country’s transitional government announced it would not authorize the trial. A CDC-funded study that would have withheld the vaccine from 7,000 newborns for their first six weeks of life was dead.

The raid was unexpected. It came months after the study survived international condemnation, a leaked protocol, a revoked ethics review, and a last-minute revision designed to sidestep the very objections that had triggered the outrage. The fact that a West African police force — not a Western ethics board, not the World Health Organization, not the Africa CDC — was what finally stopped the trial says something important about where real power sits on issues of medical research in former colonies.

What also matters is who funded the study and why. The CDC committed $1.6 million to a proposal from researchers at the University of Southern Denmark who have spent decades promoting what they call the “non-specific effects” of vaccines — a phrase that, as medical ethicists and independent researchers have pointed out, functions as coded language for the claim that vaccines cause more harm than they prevent. The lead researchers, Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby, are figures Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly praised as “deities of vaccine research.” He cited their work when he announced the United States would cut more than a billion dollars in funding to Gavi, the global vaccine alliance that has immunized over half of the world’s children in low-income countries.

The Trial’s Core Violation

The science here was always thin. The proposed study planned to give the hepatitis B vaccine to 7,000 newborns and withhold it from another 7,000 until they turned six weeks old, then compare health outcomes. Guinea-Bissau already recommends the vaccine at six weeks due to access constraints and plans universal birth-dose administration by 2027 in line with WHO guidance. Withholding the vaccine for six weeks in a country where nearly one in five people live with chronic hepatitis B and where 90 percent of exposed newborns develop lifelong infection was not a scientific question. It was a ethical one, and the answer was clear.

Physician Jeremy Faust at Inside Medicine noted that the trial could not possibly measure the outcomes it claimed to study. Hepatitis B causes liver cancer and cirrhosis decades after infection. Asking whether a six-week delay in vaccination matters by looking at rashes or neurodevelopmental conditions in infancy is, as Faust put it, like evaluating chemotherapy by checking whether the patient is alive a week later.

Even worse, the original protocol did not plan to screen mothers for hepatitis B before delivery. Given the infection rate in Guinea-Bissau, this meant thousands of infants assigned to the unvaccinated group would almost certainly contract the virus from their mothers. David Boulware, an infectious disease physician at the University of Minnesota, calculated that the study would consign roughly 1,425 infants to what he called “almost certain” hepatitis B infection. That number alone should have ended the discussion before it began.

The Revision That Wasn’t Enough

After the Africa CDC announced the trial was cancelled and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom called it unethical in February, U.S. officials from the Department of Health and Human Services pushed back. They insisted the study would proceed and dismissed the Africa CDC as a “powerless, fake organization,” according to Rolling Stone. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation then pledged $1.8 million to keep the research alive.

In October, an ethics committee at the University of Southern Denmark voted to allow the trial to move forward — despite four members resigning in protest. The revised protocol added maternal hepatitis B screening before delivery. Infants born to positive mothers would receive the vaccine and be excluded. Infants born to negative mothers would enter the trial with a 50 percent chance of going unvaccinated.

This adjustment did not resolve the fundamental problem. The hepatitis B test has a five percent false-negative rate. The virus transmits easily through household contact — nail clippers, toothbrushes, open wounds. And families who declined to participate in the study would receive zero vaccine protection for their children, making any claim to informed consent hollow in a country with low literacy rates and limited healthcare infrastructure. As Melody Schreiber reported for The Guardian, the revised design still left 7,000 newborns vulnerable for no scientifically defensible reason.

The Danish Connection and Its Discontents

The Bandim Health Project has operated in Guinea-Bissau since 1978. The country was never a Danish colony — it was Portuguese. The researchers’ presence there is not the product of historical ties but of a long-standing arrangement in which Western institutions conduct research on African populations under conditions of profound power asymmetry. Guinea-Bissau lacks a functional public health system. Bandim is effectively the leading health organization in the country. That concentration of influence makes independent oversight nearly impossible and gives outside researchers outsized authority over medical policy in a nation that cannot easily say no.

This is not new. It echoes the Tuskegee syphilis study and countless other instances in which American and European researchers have treated African bodies as data points while denying those same interventions to their own populations. The Danish researchers have said the same thing about “non-live” vaccines — including mRNA and polio shots — that American anti-vaccine advocates have said about aluminum adjuvants and thimerosal: that the benefits are a fiction and the harms are suppressed.

In 2025, a separate group of Danish researchers led by Henrik Støvring conducted a comprehensive review of Bandim’s entire body of work and found it fundamentally flawed. The studies highlighted results that confirmed their hypotheses and ignored those that did not. “It is concerning that such a prominent research group has conducted so many randomized trials over such a long period without finding real results,” Støvring said. Two of the original Bandim researchers had already reanalyzed their own 2017 Lancet paper using 2010s data and found no effect of the DTP vaccine on child mortality — the very finding Bandim had used to justify years of advocacy against routine immunization.

What This Means at Home

The Guinea-Bissau trial was never going to change American policy directly. But it was a stress test for the kind of thinking that now operates inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In December 2025, RFK Jr. and his appointed vaccine advisory committee voted to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine until two months of age, replacing the current practice of universal newborn vaccination. A judge blocked the change, but the lawsuit is ongoing. If it succeeds, the shift would affect every baby born in the United States.

Researchers published a paper in October predicting that altering the current schedule would expose more than half of Americans to hepatitis B by age 20. Another study found that 1.3 percent of 158,000 children in Kaiser Permanente Northern California were exposed to hepatitis B through household contact — a reminder that the virus does not discriminate by vaccination status.

The $1.6 million the CDC allocated to the Guinea-Bissau trial could have funded a decade of universal hepatitis B vaccination for newborns in the country. It is unlikely the money will be redirected to that purpose. The CDC has not publicly explained why it funded the study or whether it intends to recover the grant.

The Broader Pattern

What happened in Guinea-Bissau is not an isolated incident. It is a case study in how anti-vaccine ideology, once embedded within a government institution, can project its influence outward — funding research in weak health systems, recruiting allies among foreign researchers, building alternative evidence bases, and testing whether the international norms that once constrained medical experimentation in low-income countries still hold.

The raid that stopped the trial was carried out by a police force answering to a transitional military government that came to power after a coup. That detail alone should not be romanticized — Guinea-Bissau’s political instability is a serious problem in its own right. But it does suggest that in moments of institutional rupture, local actors can sometimes do what international bodies and ethics committees could not: enforce basic standards of care on researchers who assumed no one would stop them.

The trial is cancelled. For now. But the ideology behind it remains active inside the U.S. government, the lawsuit over the hepatitis B schedule delay is still moving through the courts, and the researchers who designed the study continue to publish and advocate. The question is not whether they will try something like this again. The question is what — and where — next.