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In 1996, Guinea-Bissau it seemed like a good place for research for pediatrician Lone Graff Stensballe. His manager, a fellow Dane named Peter Aaby, destroyed it nearly twenty years of data collection per 100,000 people living in the mud brick houses of the West African capital.
Aaby and his colleague, Christine Stabell Benn, believe that years of research in the impoverished country have yielded a great deal of information about vaccines – and what they described as “false facts”: Measles and tuberculosis vaccines, which came from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, they said, boosted children’s survival rates.
But, the scientists said, shots made from the killed germs, or fragments thereof, such as the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) shot, killed more people, especially young girls, than no vaccination at all.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly and impartially analyzed these surprising findings. He used to attract other health researchers around the world, who found Aaby’s research methods unusual and the results often impossible to repeat.
Then came Donald Trump, Covid, and the anti-vaccine administration of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Suddenly, Aaby and Benn weren’t just sending smoke signals far from the far side of the world. He was expressing their opinions with confidence and guidelines for online and medical journals. The “structure” of “vaccine testing, approval, and administration needs to be changed to address these challenges,” their team wrote. 2023 review.
And the Trump administration has noticed.
“They insisted that what they found was real and that the world needed to do something about it,” said Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert who has been familiar with Aaby’s work since the 1990s. “And he was very close to RFK.”
Kennedy, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he mentioned one of Aaby’s papers to justify spending $2.6 billion in US support for Gavi, the global vaccine trial partnership. The cuts could lead to 1.2 million preventable deaths over five years in the world’s poorest countries, the nonprofit said. Kennedy is frozen $600 million in Gavi’s current payments for vaccine safety targets that have been discontinued.
Kennedy explained 2017 paper such as a “legendary study” by “five prominent vaccine experts” that found that girls who received the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, or DTP, shot were 10 times more likely to die from all causes than unvaccinated children.
In fact, the study was too small to confidently make such a claim, as Benn acknowledged. In a historical study that included 535 girls, four of those who received the DTP vaccine within three months of infancy died of unrelated causes, while one girl who was not vaccinated died at that time. A following published by the same group in 2022 found that the DTP shot itself had no effect on mortality. Critics say the 2017 study, rather than being a landmark, provided an example of the problems they see in the Danish group’s research.
As Aaby and Benn’s reputation in the US rises, scientists in Denmark have started their own work. In news and magazines documents published in the last 18 months, Danish statisticians and infectious disease experts say that the two methods were. unacceptableon worthlessand they are designed to help original opinion. The world’s scientific community is investigating their work.
Stensballe, who worked with Aaby and Benn for 20 years, has been one of the sceptics.
“It took me many years to see what I see clearly today, that there is something wonderful about their work,” Stensballe said in a phone interview from Copenhagen, where he helps children at Rigshospitalet, the city’s largest teaching hospital. He also said that their work is full of bias – favoring interpretations that fit their own views.
