Guinea-Bissau’s foreign minister has said his government has stopped a hepatitis B vaccine trial funded by the Trump administration that was condemned by the World Health Organization as unethical.
The study had drawn an outcry from scientists and international health bodies because only half the newborns in the trial would get the vaccine at birth.
Guinea-Bissau last month suspended the trial pending an ethical review.
Critics had said it was being used to test theories linking vaccines to autism, long promoted by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr but contradicted by scientific evidence.
Foreign Minister Joao Bernardo Vieira said in an interview on Tuesday that the study had been closed, citing concerns raised by the scientific community as well as US senators.
“It’s not going to happen, period,” he said.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had approved a $1.6 million grant to fund the trial.
The study by researchers at the Guinea-Bissau-based Bandim Health Project, run by the University of Southern Denmark, aimed to enroll 14,000 newborns, specifically to investigate potential “non-specific effects” including skin and neuro-developmental disorders, including autism.
Under the trial, half the infants would receive it at birth, the remainder at six weeks, as now.
But the WHO insisted last week that a study giving a proven life-saving intervention to some but not others exposes newborns to “potentially irreversible harm”, it said.
It said the existing hepatitis B birth dose vaccine was an “effective and essential” public health intervention, with a proven record.
Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer, the lead investigator, said the discussion had shifted to politics instead of healthy scientific debate.
“Everyone will lose if this trial is halted but, especially, confidence in vaccines and health research will suffer greatly,” he said.
He said the group still hoped that a new trial proposal might be accepted in future.
The Bandim project has spent decades in Guinea-Bissau and the researchers say their work aims to better understand the full impact of vaccines, both positive and negative.