Technology and Science20 October, 20262 min read
Guinea-Bissau Judicial Police Raid Danish Bandim Health Project Over Hepatitis B Vaccine Trial
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Police in Guinea-Bissau raided researchers' offices and seized hepatitis B vaccine doses for newborn trial. The trial is supported by about $1.6 million from Kennedy-linked sources.
Save coverage image
A wider view of the story
Explore source coverage 2 source types
Directory totals describe our source library, not outlets checked for this story.
Raid and funding dispute
Judicial police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers at the Bandim Health Project on Monday, seizing doses of hepatitis B vaccine intended for a newborn trial. The police search took place on Monday and described “investigative procedures aimed at clarifying the circumstances related to the said batch of vaccines,” while the announcement said seizing the immunizations did not point to “irregularities in the quality, safety, or effectiveness of the vaccines”. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in December that it had awarded the Danish researchers, led by Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, an unsolicited $1.6 million grant to run the trial.
Plans for the trial were halted in January after condemnation over a design that would potentially expose thousands of newborns in the country to hepatitis B, risking a lifelong infection that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cancer, and premature death. Outrage flared again after a Rolling Stone story claimed the CDC set aside another $1.6 million in funding in late September and planned to move forward with the trial.
Ethics, approvals, and redesign
The Bandim Health Project posted a letter of approval for the trial from Guinea-Bissau’s national ethics committee at the ministry of public health, dated 14 July and signed by the committee’s president, Mouhammed Djicó Ould Ahmed. A Danish research ethics committee approved the study earlier this month after changing its rules to consider a clinical trial. Quinhin Nantote, the health minister of Guinea-Bissau’s transitional government, said, “This is not even remotely true,” as he disputed reports that the trial would move forward.
The study was redesigned over the summer but would still deny hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 newborns in the first six weeks of life, in a country where about one in five adults have the virus. The World Health Organization expressed grave concerns regarding the proposed randomized controlled trial’s “scientific justification, ethical safeguards, and overall alignment with established principles for research involving human participants.”
New trial results and what’s at stake
A randomized, double-blind, positive-controlled clinical trial in 300 healthy infants found that a Sabin strain-based inactivated poliovirus vaccine elicited neutralizing antibody responses against Sabin, Salk and recently circulating poliovirus strains. Among 282 infants who completed the full vaccination course and provided paired blood samples, the test vaccine produced seroconversion rates of 91.58% to 100% against the ten virus strains tested. The study found an acceptable safety profile, with no vaccine-related serious adverse events reported, while mild-to-moderate reactions occurred more frequently in the test-vaccine group than in either control group.
Newborns are “unprotected” until Guinea-Bissau mandates the birth dose in 2028, and a WHO statement said the hepatitis B birth dose is a time-tested vaccine used for over 30 years. Tarik Jašarević called hepatitis B vaccination at birth an “essential public health intervention,” adding that any study that would deny the vaccine to participants was “unethical and exposes newborns to serious and potentially irreversible harm.”