The dissident African quest of a Danish couple finds its time in RFK Junior’s vaccine policy

– 1996 Guinea Bissau It seemed like the perfect research job for budding pediatrician Lone Graf Stenspaal. Its supervisor, a Danish national named Peter Abbe, had spent nearly two decades collecting data on 100,000 people living in mud-brick homes in the capital of the West African country.

Abe and his partner, Christine Staple Penn, believe that years of research in the impoverished country have yielded a major discovery about vaccines — and what they describe as “nonspecific effects”: Measles and tuberculosis vaccines, derived from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, boosted children’s survival beyond protection against those specific pathogens.

But scientists said shots made with inactivated whole germs, or parts of them, such as the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTP) vaccine, caused more deaths – especially among young girls – than getting no vaccine at all.

The World Health Organization has examined these startling results repeatedly and inconclusively. They tended to draw disapproval from other global health researchers, who found Abbey’s research techniques unusual and his findings generally impossible to replicate.

Then came Donald Trump, Covid, and the administrative era of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Suddenly, Abe and Ben weren’t just sending out distant smoke signals from a faraway corner of the planet. They confidently expressed their political opinions and prescriptions online and in medical journals. The “framework” for testing, approval and regulation of vaccines needs to be updated to accommodate unidentified effects, their team wrote in the 2023 review.

The Trump administration has taken notice.

“They became more aggressive in saying that their findings were real and that the world needed to do something about it,” said Katherine Edwards, a vaccine scientist at Vanderbilt University who has known about Abbey’s work since the 1990s. “And they are becoming more compatible with RFK.”

Kennedy, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, cited one of Abe’s papers to justify a $2.6 billion cut in US support for GAVI, a global coalition of vaccination initiatives. These cuts could lead to 1.2 million avoidable deaths over five years in the world’s poorest countries, according to estimates by the non-profit organization. Kennedy froze $600 million in existing funding for Gavi due to largely debunked vaccine safety claims.

Kennedy described the 2017 research as a “landmark study” conducted by “five respected key vaccine experts” that found that girls who received the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine were 10 times more likely to die from all causes than unvaccinated children.

In fact, the study was much too small to make such assertions with confidence, Penn admitted. In a study of historical data that included 535 girls, four of those vaccinated against DTP died during a three-month period of breastfeeding from unrelated causes, while one unvaccinated girl died during that period. A follow-up published by the same group in 2022 found that the DTP dose by itself had no effect on mortality. Critics say the 2017 study, rather than being a landmark, exemplifies the troubling shortcomings they see in the Danish team’s research.

As Abe and Ben’s fame rose in the United States, scientists in Denmark began working on their compatriots’ achievements. In news stories and newspaper articles published over the past 18 months, Danish statisticians and infectious disease experts have said the duo’s methods were unorthodox, even shoddy, and designed to support preconceived views. A national scientific board is investigating their work.

Steinspall, who has worked with Abe and Ben for 20 years, was among those who expressed doubts.

“It took me years to see what I see clearly today, which is that there is a strange, worrying pattern in their work,” Stenspaale said in a phone interview from Copenhagen, where she treats children at Rigshospitalet, the city’s largest teaching hospital. She said their work is full of confirmation bias, where they favor explanations that fit their hypotheses.