Guinea-Bissau says it never approved a controversial US-funded study that would have withheld the hepatitis B vaccine from thousands of its newborn babies.🇬🇼🇺🇸
The trial, backed by $1.6 million from the CDC under vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, proposed giving the birth-dose vaccine to half of 14,000 newborns while denying it to the other half, then tracking their health.
It was designed by Danish researchers and had sparked an international outcry, with the World Health Organization and scientists condemning it as unethical in a country where nearly one in five people are infected with hepatitis B.
A Danish ethics committee recently voted to let the study proceed, partly after being told Guinea-Bissau had approved an updated design.
But the country’s health minister, Quinhin Nantote, has now flatly denied that his ministry ever authorised the trial, throwing its future into fresh doubt.
