A disturbing vaccine experiment backed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been facing accusations of eugenics and has garnered comparisons to the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiment — yet it’s moving forward in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau.
So continues the Trump administration’s fundamentally racist strategy when it comes to Africa, a continent the president and his allies have sought to exploit and strip of its resources, from precious minerals to health data.
I wrote about the Kennedy-backed experiment — in which thousands of African infants are to be denied the hepatitis B vaccine for the first six weeks after birth — back in January. Around that time, it was suspended by African officials amid outrage over the project’s ethics and its similarities with eugenics and the deadly Tuskegee experiment, which saw hundreds of Black men denied syphilis treatment for decades in the name of medical experimentation, starting in the 1930s.
To be clear, questions about the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns have already been asked and answered in the affirmative by reputable scientists.
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Ja’han Jones
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.