Last week, we broke down a major debacle unfolding in the health research space. To recap: over the past month, concerned researchers have been sounding the alarm about a reprehensible vaccine study which was to be funded by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the tune of $1.6 million.
According to the trial protocols, obtained by Inside Medicine writer and physician Jeremy Faust from an anonymous American employee at the US Center for Disease Control (US CDC), the research would have followed 14,000 infants in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The problem? Only 7,000 of those newborns would have received an urgently needed hepatitis B vaccine, in order to compare the two groups. On top of the flagrant ethics violations, the total cost of the research would have exceeded the cost to pay for “over a decade’s worth of Hepatitis B vaccine birth doses [for everyone] in Guinea-Bissau.”
In their interview with Faust, the unnamed CDC employee called it “another Tuskegee,” a reference to the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which hundreds of Black men with syphilis were studied by government researchers — who never informed them of their disease or made them aware of the treatment that had been discovered for it.
“I have read every word of the protocol dated January 14, 2026,” Faust told Futurism in an email. “It is wretched.”
At the time of our writing, the Guardian had reported that officials with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention — the public health agency run by the African Union, not to be confused with the US CDC — stated that the trial had been halted, seemingly by Guinea-Bissau’s public health authorities.
This is where things get weird. In an email responding to our post about the situation, an official from the HHS press office declared that the vaccine trial was still on.
“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.”
The official also makes it clear that the HHS sees these infants more like lab rats than human beings.
“This research represents the world’s first, and potentially only, opportunity to rigorously evaluate the overall health effects of [hepatitis B],” they continued.
Those comments are astonishing enough. But in followup remarks that they insisted were “on background” — despite the fact that we’d agreed to no such arrangement — they went on to disparage their colleagues at the Africa CDC in coarse terms that were striking even by the standards of the notoriously churlish Trump administration.
“This is a powerless, fake organization attempting to manufacture credibility by repeating its claims publicly,” the spokesperson wrote. “It is not a reliable source, and its statements should be treated accordingly.”
The HHS didn’t respond to repeated requests to explain the outburst.
It’s a stunning comment about the Africa CDC, the official health agency of the African Union, which represents 55 African nations. This isn’t some fly-by-night shell operation — it’sa health organization that served as the COVID-19 testing hub for 48 African countries at the outbreak of the pandemic, and which has coordinated millions of emergency vaccines for infectious diseases ranging from malaria to mpox.
In October, the World Health Organization and the Africa CDC signed a landmark collaboration agreement to “consolidate their partnership” and “accelerate progress toward shared health goals.” Simply put, if there were any serious question of Africa CDC’s legitimacy, the WHO — a specialized agency of the United Nations — would not have signed off on this strategic agreement.
As for the HHS claiming the controversial study is still on, the Africa CDC tells us there’s a press conference this Thursday — so we’ll be watching.
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