The Trump administration is trying to discredit Africa’s top health organization as the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, faces rebuke for backing a vaccine program that has drawn comparisons to the racist Tuskegee experiment.
Under the control of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS has become a hotbed for crackpot health theories and has seen disturbing moves — especially with regard to vaccine schedules. After he was nominated to lead the agency, many people — such as Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md. — specifically warned about Kennedy’s antiscientific bigotry and its risk to our country’s public health when she took him to task for his false claims about Black people not needing the same vaccines white people get.
As I wrote at the time, Kennedy’s views are best understood within the context of our country’s “sordid and well-documented history of medical racism, including white health officials denying health care to Black people.” That history includes the Tuskegee experiment, which saw hundreds of Black men denied treatment for syphilis for decades in Alabama in the name of medical experimentation, starting in the 1930s.
And health experts are warning that a similar project appears to be unfolding in Guinea-Bissau, where an HHS-funded study was set to withhold a hepatitis B vaccine from some infants in order to revisit the efficacy of a vaccine that has already proved to be safe and effective. The experiment has been derided by numerous health experts — such as Dr. Jeremy Faust, who wrote about the study on his Substack, and Dr. Paul Offit, a former adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who rebuked the study in a post with the headline “RFK Jr.’s Tuskegee Experiment.”
Amid the controversy, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that the study had been “canceled” and said it would move forward only if ethical concerns were addressed. But the Trump administration, via an HHS spokesperson, has rebutted that claim, telling Futurism:
“To be clear, the trial will proceed as planned,” the spokesperson insisted. “Africa CDC, an organization with no affiliation to the US CDC, shared weeks-old communications unrelated to the trial as part of a public-relations campaign aimed to shape public perception rather than engaging with the scientific facts.” … “This research represents the world’s first, and potentially only, opportunity to rigorously evaluate the overall health effects of [hepatitis B],” they continued. The outlet quoted the HHS official as saying the African health agency is a “powerless, fake organization attempting to manufacture credibility by repeating its claims publicly.” That’s certainly ironic coming from an administration that has spread falsehoods with abandon. When I asked HHS for comment on the similarities between the Tuskegee experiment and the Guinea-Bissau study, and how the department planned to prevent avoidable deaths, a spokesperson reiterated the claim that the African experiment represents a valuable opportunity. HHS added that the study “aims to fill existing evidence gaps to help inform global hepatitis B vaccine policy,” but to be clear: The question of whether it’s safe to administer the vaccine to infants has already been asked and answered by reputable scientists. Nonetheless, I’d argue this entire ordeal is indicative of the Trump administration’s colonial and fundamentally destructive approach to the African continent, which it tends to either treat as a waste bin where it can discard people targeted in the president’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown, a region from which to extract coveted minerals or a petri dish to test out the spread of curable diseases.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
