In 1996, Guinea-Bissau seemed like an ideal research post for budding pediatrician Lone Graff Stensballe. Her supervisor, a fellow Dane named Peter Aaby, had spent nearly two decades collecting data on 100,000 people living in the mud brick homes of the West African country’s capital.
Aaby and his partner, Christine Stabell Benn, believed that the years of research in the impoverished country had yielded a major discovery about vaccines — and what they described as “non-specific effects”: The measles and tuberculosis vaccines, which were derived from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, they said, boosted child survival beyond protecting against those particular pathogens.
But, the scientists said, shots made from deactivated whole germs, or pieces of them, such as the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shot, caused more deaths — especially in little girls — than getting no vaccine at all.
The World Health Organization repeatedly and inconclusively examined these astonishing findings, which tended to elicit shrugs from the researchers’ colleagues in global health.
Then came Donald Trump, covid, and the administrative reign of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Suddenly, Aaby and Benn weren’t just sending up distant smoke signals from a far corner of the planet. They were confidently voicing their views and policy prescriptions online and in medical journals. The “framework” for “testing, approving, and regulating vaccines needs to be updated to accommodate non-specific e …