Guinea-Bissau. Mud brick homes. 100, Just over 100,00 souls living in the capital. That’s where Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn spent nearly twenty years collecting data. Back in the nineties, they weren’t trying to shake up American health policy. They were just looking at what vaccines actually do out there, in the wild.
They found something odd. Or rather, they said they did.
Live-attenuated vaccines—the measles shot, the TB shot—these seemed to do more than just stop one specific disease. The claim? They boosted the child’s overall survival. Like a general immune kick in the pants.
Then came the DTP shot. Diphtheria. Tetanus. Pertussis. This one is made from inactivated germ bits. Aaby and Benn argued this specific cocktail killed children. Especially little girls. They said the risk was higher than giving no shot at all.
The World Health Organization looked. They shrugged. Other researchers looked. They shrugged harder. The results couldn’t be replicated. The methods looked… unusual. To say the least.
So it stayed quiet. Buried in niche journals. Distant smoke signals from a corner of the globe.
Until now.
“The framework for testing, approving, and regulating vaccines needs be updated to accommodate non specific effects.”
That was a 2023 writeup from their team. Bold words. Strident words.
Then Donald Trump came back. And with him, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running the Department of Health and Human Health. Suddenly, those smoke signals became a flare. Bright red. Igniting policy.
RFK didn’t just like their data. He used it. Specifically, a 2017 paper. He called it a “landmark study.” Said five “mainstream” experts proved vaccinated girls were ten times more likely to die than unvaccinated ones.
Kennedy slashed $2.6 billion. Cut it from Gavi. The global vaccine alliance. An estimated 1.2 million extra deaths in poor countries over five years. He froze another $600 million. Why? Because safety concerns. Large ones. Based largely on debunked claims.
Here’s the catch. That landmark paper? It had 535 girls in it. Five girls. No, wait. Let me look again. Five hundred thirty five total participants. In one short three-month window of infancy, four vaccinated girls died. Of unrelated things. One unvaccinated girl died.
Do the math. That isn’t a trend. That is noise.
A followup study in 2022 from the same group admitted as much. Said the DTP shot actually had no effect on mortality. Critics are laughing. Or crying. Probably both.
The Homecoming
Aaby and Benn aren’t anonymous anymore. They have a platform. And the Trump administration is listening.
In Denmark, things are getting uncomfortable for our neighbors across the water. Their compatriots are turning on them.
Statisticians. Infectious disease experts. They’ve been publishing for 18 months now, tearing apart the methodology. Calling it unorthodox. Shoddy. Biased. A national scientific board is now investigating the whole operation.
Lone Graff Stensballe knows. She worked with Aaby and Benn. For twenty years.
“It took years,” she said, from her hospital desk in Copenhagen. “But now I see it. A strange concerning pattern. Confirmation bias.”
They see what they want to see.
“Those hypotheses overlap, in important areas with the notions of Kennedy.”
Stensballe doesn’t mince words. Their work favors the hypothesis. Not the data.
Now the HHS is funding them again. $1.6 million. For the Bandim group. The mission? Study the hepatitis B birth dose. The hypothesis: maybe it weakens baby immune systems. Causes neuro issues.
The plan is unethical enough to make you gag. Withhold the vaccine from half the newborns. 7,000 babies. No protection. Even though the shot is 90% effective.
Their defense? Guinea-Bissau doesn’t routinely give it there yet.
The rebuttal? One in five adults there have hepatitis B. Leaving 7,000 vulnerable? The WHO says that is bad. Really bad. Unethical.
The study is paused. Paused as of May. Why? Because the local ministers don’t believe the ethics committee even met.
House of Cards
It’s not just the new money. It’s the old data. Or lack thereof.
Danes love them, sort of. They are famous. There’s a novel—The Arc of the Swallow. A thriller about a corporate hitman killing a scientist who knows too much about DTP. Benn says she inspired it. Irony? Maybe. Or marketing.
They trained 50 scientists. Published 1,000 papers. Benn was knighted. By the King. The “non-specific effects” idea is in Plotkin’s Vaccines, the bible of the field. A small chapter. But still. Respectable?
The Danish government isn’t buying it.
Anders Hviid, chief guy at Statens Serum Institut (the Danish CDC), knows Benn personally. Denmark’s tiny vaccine crowd is tight-knit. You know everyone.
“What’s important is Christine doesn’t influence our policy,” Hviid says. Flatly.
Danish kids get the standard schedule. Inactivated vaccines. All of them. Hviid actually wrote a paper in 2019 showing no link between MMR and autism. RFK tried to get that retracted. Failed.
Hviid did another one recently. Showed no link between aluminum vaccines and allergies. RFK went after that too. Failed again.
In a podcast, Benn got weird. She said her kids (now adults) were vaccinated fully under the Danish plan. Which includes DTaP. A smoother DTP variant.
“Never vaccinate according to the US program,” she said. “Appalled by the CDC’s hepatitis birth dose recommendation.”
Of course. Her own group wants to withhold it from African babies to “study” it.
Missing Pieces
Things went off the rails in 2024. A journalist, Charlotte Strøm, looked closer. She found missing data. Data that contradicted their claim that DTP kills kids. They collected it. But never published it.
Strøm called it an ethical scandal. Weekendavisen, a major Danish paper, ran with it. An investigation ensued.
University of Southern Denmark (where Benn teaches) forwarded the probe to the research misconduct board.
Why hide data that hurts your case?
Aaby and Benn eventually released the study. Their excuse? A coauthor died. Another got pregnant and quit. So the data sat there. For years.
“Fishy,” said Henrik Støvring. He’s a statistician. He co-authored the challenge. “Very fishy.”
A January paper by Hviid questioned if they’d proved anything at all about non-specific effects. Maybe none. Maybe just noise.
Then there is the BCG vaccine. Tuberculosis.
Aaby and Benn ran a revaccination trial. Some babies died. Eighteen deaths. Versus four in the control. Within four months.
They stopped the study. Obviously. But the suspicion lingers.
Edwards from Vanderbilt warns about this. “Given the suspicion with this group… African authorities need heightened attention.”
The Split Decision
The DTP controversy is the big one. It is the flagship of their skepticism. If they were right, it would be huge. Groundbreaking. Deadly truth revealed.
But experts say they are wrong.
Look at the Ghana-Tanzania study. 55,00 newborns. Huge data. Both BCG and DTP improved survival. Clear signal.
They tried to publish. Benn reviewed the paper. As a peer. She fought it. Hard. The authors eventually went elsewhere to get it out in 2022.
“Benn involves splitting trial data up,” said Emily Smith of GW University. “A bunch of ways. Different methods. If you split enough… you find what you want to find.”
Data mining. P-hacking. Or whatever you want to call it.
Hviid says they shift hypotheses to fit the noise. Footnotes cite only each other.
“It’s a house of cards,” Hviid said. “Look at the numbers. There’s nothing there.”
Hundreds of thousands of African babies were used for these tests. Stensballe asks, simply: “Is that ethical?”
The Connection
How did a niche African research team become the basis of US health policy?
Follow the internet. And the money.
During COVID, Benn befriended Tracy Beth Høeg. An epidemiologist. A skeptic. Høeg ran the FDA for a bit (until she was fired). They bonded online. YouTube broadcasts. Lockdowns. Vaccine skepticism.
Benn argued mRNA shots weren’t tested enough. Let kids get it. Let the virus run its course.
Høeg got a job at University of Southern Denmark in April 202. Right where Benn sits. Coincidence?
Then came Bill Ackman. Hedge fund guy. Trump ally. Skeptic of the schedule.
He gave $1.8 million. To the Pershing Square Foundation. To Aaby and Benn.
It wasn’t a grant request. It was an alignment of interests.
Kennedy cites Aaby. Aaby cites Benn. They cite each other.
The judge has blocked RFK’s changes to the vaccine schedule temporarily. March 16. But the damage to public trust? Hard to rewind.
Danish authorities are watching. The Board on Research Misconduct is investigating. The African CDC is checking the ethics committees.
And Aaby? Benn?
No comment.
