Last December, news broke that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had awarded $1.6 million to a Danish vaccine research group to study the effects of the hepatitis B vaccine on infants in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. The proposed five-year study compared outcomes between infants vaccinated at birth and those vaccinated at six weeks of age. As a medical student and researcher, I was shocked by the brazen inequity of the trial.
Randomized controlled trials have already demonstrated superior outcomes when the hepatitis B vaccine is administered at birth. More troubling, however, was the setting of the study. Guinea-Bissau is a highly endemic country for hepatitis B, where vaccination coverage lags behind global averages and roughly 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.
