Oct 11, 2026, 11:40 PM@grimalkina The article doesn't have much to say about the Guinea-Bissau side of this, except “officials in Guinea-Bissau have also greenlit the project”. Do you understand who did this and why? I feel like a big piece of the story is missing.
@mjd I really do not know, but totally agree
@mjd I mean RFK jr is a very prominent anti vaxxer and presumably people in power in this whole thing are too
Oct 12, 2026, 1:27 PM@grimalkina I can't help but notice that they didn't quote any of the people on the committee who voted in favor of doing the study, or the researchers who planned it. Often news articles have an indication that some people declined to comment, or could not be reached, but this one doesn't. Does that mean that the Guardian didn't try?
And I notice there's no actual criticism of the vaccine science itself. They quote the Danish ethics guy, and they quote Paul Offit from CHOP, who does not address the study, he's only there to criticize RFK. The article leans hard on RFK's approval of the study, but that's a very, very weak argument against it. The article is just using him to taint the study by association. "RFK likes it so it must be bad" is not good reasoning.
I'm not a vaccine scientist at all, I know next to nothing about vaccines. But I can imagine a world in which there was some evidence of real health benefits from delaying a particular vaccine by six weeks. I don't know if that's the world we are in, but if it were then it wouldn't be unethical to conduct the study, since there would be a legitimate reason to think that the experimental group of infants would be getting a better outcome than the control group.
The article does point out that in Denmark, infants don't normally receive a Hep-B vaccine at all, unless the mother tests positive for it. So different policies make sense in different places. Maybe there's something about the epidemiology of Hep-B that makes this a plausible change for Guinea-Bissau. The author of the article doesn't appear to have tried to find out.
Really the article is quite terrible. Something's going on here, but I have no idea what.
@mjd @grimalkina the real argument against the study is that, in the modern era of medical research we do not do studies where a) the medication is known to work; and b) withholding the medication will cause harm. The rationale for that is heavily embedded in human subjects research approvals across the entire landscape of institutions. Usually the rationale is referenced back to past blatantly unethical practices (e.g.-https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html)
Oct 12, 2026, 1:41 PM@wronglang @grimalkina But they aren't withholding it. They're only administering it on a different schedule.
@mjd @wronglang that directly changes risks for infants.
@grimalkina @mjd I mean otherwise they wouldn't have a study, but also Guinea-Bissau has a monstrous prevalence rate (old estimate I found was 18%) so it's clearly bumping risk. It also makes the infants more likely to become carriers.
@mjd @grimalkina so the guardian article just be low quality journalism, and there are studies that are legitimately borderline (e.g.-there was a drug, administered by paramedics on the way to the hospital, that could save people with massive bleeding but the price tag could blow away the hospital budget for a handful of doses) but this study is in the boring + unethical category. Risks lives for no new information.
@mjd please look up what public health researchers are saying about this study design
@mjd this is a very well known topic and very well studied. you could spend the time you spent writing that comment looking into it.
@grimalkina @mjd
FYI, the article was written by a freelancer, Melody Schreiber. Contact info below — it's been my experience that good journalists respond when you reach out:
https://melodyschreiber.com/about/