A study paid for by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have given the hepatitis B birth dose to only half of 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau, a country where nearly one in five people carries the virus. The other half would have waited six weeks. House Democrats demanded answers from the agency on Thursday, and Guinea-Bissau’s government has already said no once.
The Energy and Commerce Committee’s top Democrats, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, Diana DeGette of Colorado and Yvette Clarke of New York, gave the CDC until Thursday, Nov. 5 to respond. “CDC has apparently chosen to fund Secretary Kennedy’s anti-vaccine pet projects rather than address urgent public health problems here in the United States,” they wrote. Their release says the study has been halted again this month.
The stakes fall on Black African children. Left unvaccinated at birth, up to 90% of infants exposed to hepatitis B develop chronic infection, and 15% to 25% of those die early of liver cancer or liver failure, according to CIDRAP, the infectious disease news service at the University of Minnesota. Guinea-Bissau does not give a birth dose now. It plans to start in 2028. In the US, the shot is routine at birth. Critics said a trial like this one would not be approved here.
The CDC announced the $1.6 million award in December 2025. The Danish team behind it, the Bandim Health Project, wanted to test claims about the vaccine’s “non-specific” effects on children’s health. In February, Guinea-Bissau’s foreign minister, Joao Bernardo Vieira, ended it publicly: “It’s not going to happen, period.” The World Health Organization had said it had “significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific justification, ethical safeguards, and overall alignment with established principles for research involving human participants.”
It did not stay dead. Rolling Stone reported on Oct. 2 that CDC leaders were pushing to resume it. The University of Southern Denmark’s dean of health sciences, Jakob Grauslund, approved a revised protocol based on an independent ethics assessment, and the researchers said that “No child enrolled in the study will receive fewer vaccines than under current national policy in Guinea-Bissau.” The revised plan won approval from the country’s ethics committee in the summer. Final government authorization had not been granted, and the study could not begin without it.
The group Stand Up for Science called the plan “a gross violation of human rights and the use of bad science against some of the most vulnerable people in the world.”
Black patients in the United States know the history of research that treats their health as a variable. The Tuskegee syphilis study withheld treatment from Black men for 40 years. The Guinea-Bissau trial was designed differently, and its defenders say it would have left no child worse off than the national schedule. The CDC has until Nov. 5 to say why it was paying for it.
Have your say