A US government-funded trial on the timing of hepatitis B vaccinations, which will delay vaccination for up to 7,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau, started this week.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded a controversial Danish research group a $1,6 million five-year grant to study the “optimal timing and delivery of monovalent hepatitis B vaccinations on newborns in Guinea-Bissau”, according to the US Health and Human Services’ (HHS) federal register.

The trial aims to enrol 14,000 newborns in a “randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of neonatal Hepatitis B vaccination on early-life mortality, morbidity, and long-term developmental outcomes”, according to HHS register.

Half of the babies will get vaccinated at birth, while the other half will get vaccinated six weeks later.

However, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended hepatitis B vaccinations since 1992, and universal birth vaccinations from 2009. The vaccination is usually given as a series of three or four injections, and several clinical trials have already established the best intervals for the vaccinations.

“[Robert F Kennedy Jr], the Secretary of Health and Human Services, will soon conduct his own Tuskegee experiment,” US paediatrician Dr Paul Offit, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, wrote this week on his Substack platform.

“He has chosen the resource-poor nation of Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, to do it. Guinea-Bissau is currently overwhelmed by hepatitis B virus. About 18% of the population is infected. The World Health Organization (WHO) strongly recommends that all children in all countries receive a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to prevent mother-to-child transmission,” added Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of both Paediatrics and Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania.