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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to test dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on African babies appears to be in doubt after U.S.-backed researchers in Guinea-Bissau had their offices raided by government officials.

Kennedy has been a staunch supporter of and has allocated federal funds for a controversial experiment that Dutch scientists have been trying to conduct, denying thousands of babies in Guinea-Bissau doses of the hepatitis B vaccine during their first six weeks after birth. The study has garnered comparisons to the racist Tuskegee experiment, and the controversy around this proposed test has put a spotlight on Kennedy’s history of promoting racist pseudoscience, including a claim that Black people and white people shouldn’t be on the same vaccine schedules.

Last week, officials in Guinea-Bissau challenged claims that the experiment had been approved, and now it appears to have been stopped in its tracks.

The Guardian reported on Tuesday:

Controversial vaccine researchers who have been praised by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, had their offices in Guinea-Bissau raided by judicial police, who seized doses of hepatitis B vaccines, officials said on Facebook. The researchers have been at the heart of an ongoing dispute over research on African newborns, supported by $1.6m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and matched by the Pershing Square Foundation and the Bluebell Foundation for a total of $3.2m. The police search took place on Monday, involving “investigative procedures aimed at clarifying the circumstances related to the said batch of vaccines”, according to the social media post, which was translated from Portuguese. The announcement noted that seizing the immunizations did not point to “irregularities in the quality, safety, or effectiveness of the vaccines”.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

But the prospects for the study moving forward seem grim, to say the least. In a LinkedIn post, one of the researchers, Frederik Schaltz-Buchholzer, said on Wednesday that “it is now clear” that the study “will not move forward,” adding that “we were not given the necessary governmental approval.”

When it comes to its relations with Africa, the Trump administration has taken a fundamentally racist approach, seeking to exploit and strip of the continent of its resources, from precious minerals to health data.

And while the administration has seen successes on that front, officials in Guinea-Bissau seem unwilling to comply.

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