доступно HHS Grant to Controversial Vaccine Study: Emails Reveal Decision-Making Process

On Oct. 1, 2025, two prominent Danish vaccine researchers, Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, faced potential career ruin.

A group of top Danish statisticians completed a withering analysis of the duo’s research, which would be published in the international journal Vaccine weeks later. The analysis documented “questionable research practices” and unspooled a veritable rap sheet of poor scientific practices. It followed a devastating series of articles in the weekly Danish newspaper Weekendavisen, exposing how Aaby and Stabell Benn had allegedly oversold their research findings.

Aaby, 81, and Stabell Benn, 57, who are married, are best known for pioneering a theory that vaccine opponents have embraced: that vaccines have potentially unknown and nonspecific effects on the immune system, and while some vaccines that use weakened live viruses can reduce mortality, others using inactivated viruses can increase it. For decades, they’d studied this idea, using a research outpost in the impoverished West African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

In the painstaking world of scientific research, Aaby and Stabell Benn faced a significant obstacle after months of attack: How could they continue to fund their work if question marks hovered over their methods and their results?

But just two days after the statisticians submitted their commentary to Vaccine, the couple found a financial lifeline at the top level of the U.S. government’s scientific firmament. On Oct. 3, Stabell Benn was in confidential discussions with Health and Human Services officials handpicked by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to obtain exclusive research funding, according to previously unpublished emails obtained by Rolling Stone.

Stabell Benn’s pitch: to run a randomized controlled trial in Guinea-Bissau that would give a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine to half of the 14,000 newborn participants, but not to the other half, in order to study whether the birth dose had potentially negative health effects such as skin ailments or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Her well-timed inquiry was supposedly “unsolicited,” according to the emails. But it came just as Kennedy was weighing a controversial policy shift that he announced in mid-December: to no longer universally recommend hepatitis B vaccinations, including the birth dose, which is widely credited with virtually eliminating transmission of the disease from mothers to infants.

Over the next three months, two of Kennedy’s most controversial appointees with a long history of anti-vaccine activities, Lyn Redwood and Stuart Burns, helped shepherd the no-bid grant for Stabell Benn and Aaby’s research through HHS’ bureaucratic maze, the emails show.

“This is a funding priority for CDC/HHS,” Burns, a senior adviser to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote to Stabell Benn on Nov. 14, as he looped in the director of the CDC’s Office of Grants Services. The email from Burns is marked “DRAFT, INTERNAL, DELIBERATIVE, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION PREDECISIONAL.”

Gunver Lystbæk Vestergård, a journalist for Weekendavisen, provided Rolling Stone with the documents, after obtaining them through a freedom of information request to the University of Southern Denmark, where Stabell Benn is a professor.

On Dec. 18, two days after the CDC announced that it would no longer recommend hepatitis B vaccinations for all U.S. children, the $1.6 million Guinea-Bissau grant was quietly posted in the Federal Register. It was swiftly denounced by global public-health experts as unethical for proposing to not provide a potentially lifesaving birth dose of the vaccine to half of the newborn study participants, in a nation where almost one-fifth of adults and more than one-tenth of children are infected with hepatitis B. Infants who contract the disease face steep odds: They have a 90 percent chance of developing chronic hepatitis B, and a quarter are likely to die from cirrhosis, liver cancer, and other outcomes — a fate more devastating in poor countries that lack advanced care.

The emails — though far from a complete picture — provide a window into the way that Kennedy and his handpicked allies are tossing aside longstanding review practices and working behind the scenes not only to steer grants to researchers they view as ideologically aligned, but also to fund studies they think may generate after-the-fact scientific justification for policy changes they appear determined to make.

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the CDC’s former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, who resigned from the agency last August, tells Rolling Stone that the Guinea-Bissau grant is “nowhere near where a study of this type should be both scientifically and ethically,” and he says the truncated process of its award, rather than standard practice, reflects Kennedy’s approach to science: “`Let’s start fishing and trolling to find evidence.’”

On Thursday, The Guardian reported that the ethical concerns led Africa CDC officials to reportedly halt the study, though Guinea-Bissau officials said that it can be resumed once it is redesigned. An HHS official who asked not to be named tells Rolling Stone, “It is our position the study will proceed as planned once the study protocols are finalized.”

An HHS spokesman, Andrew Nixon, defended the study, saying it is “designed to answer important questions about the broader health effects of the hepatitis B vaccine. This research aims to fill existing evidence gaps to help inform global hepatitis B vaccine policy and we will ensure the highest scientific and ethical standards are met.”

He did not respond directly to detailed questions about whether the agency’s grant review process followed standard practices.

Stabell Benn and Aaby did not respond to detailed questions from Rolling Stone, nor did the University of Southern Denmark, where they work. However, in previous public comments, they have vigorously defended their scientific findings, their integrity, and their hypothesis that vaccines have nonspecific effects that can impact mortality, and claim to have debunked the arguments leveled by their critics.

DENMARK HAS EMERGED AS A NORTH STAR of sorts for the Trump administration. We seem to want what the Danes have, whether it’s the semiautonomous territory of Greenland or their slimmed-down vaccination schedule.

On Jan. 5, Kennedy announced that the CDC would no longer universally recommend six of 17 childhood vaccinations, portraying the more minimalist vaccination schedule as better aligning the U.S. with peer nations, particularly Denmark. The change was met with a storm of criticism by U.S. vaccine experts and blasted by the American Academy of Pediatrics as “dangerous and unnecessary.”

Most Danish scientists were also baffled, pointing out that Denmark vaccinates against only 10 diseases, in part because it has a more comprehensive national health care system that can better screen for them. In fact, Denmark is an outlier, providing fewer vaccines than many other developed nations, including Germany and Japan. Kennedy’s real agenda is to “get rid of all the vaccines,” says Danish vaccine scientist Anders Hviid. “I think it’s a mistake to try and give him any other type of motive.” An HHS spokesman contested that characterization, saying, “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine. He is focused on restoring public trust and informed consent.”

In August, Hviid was personally targeted by Kennedy, after publishing in the Annals of Internal Medicine a comprehensive study of 1.2 million Danish children that found no link between aluminum in vaccines and chronic diseases, including autism. After Kennedy demanded the study be retracted, the journal refused.

By contrast, Stabell Benn has celebrated Kennedy’s ascent, telling a Danish news program in November 2024 that he could serve as a “catalyst, to open the Pandora’s box that we don’t actually know everything worth knowing about vaccines.”

In turn, Kennedy has long lionized Aaby and Stabell Benn’s research, talking it up to Joe Rogan on a 2024 podcast, and hailing Aaby as a “hero” in his 2023 book, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak. Last June, when Kennedy announced that the U.S. would no longer fund Gavi, a global alliance that buys vaccines for the world’s poorest children, he cited Aaby and Stabell Benn’s research to claim that Gavi had ignored a tenfold increase in female mortality caused by the DTP vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.

But the bandied-about claim that the DTP vaccine increased the death rate in girls had sparked the outrage of a Danish physician and journalist, Charlotte Strøm, who began digging into its origin and would soon share her findings with Vestergård at the Weekendavisen newspaper.

The initial claim had come from a 2017 study in Guinea-Bissau, conducted by Aaby and Stabell Benn at their field research station, the Bandim Health Project. Because the study was observational and not a randomized clinical trial, it met a lower standard of evidence. In an updated 2022 study, the researchers essentially walked back their initial finding, stating that they now found no increased mortality.

Despite the crumbling evidence, Stabell Benn — like many of Kennedy’s supporters — repeatedly sounded the alarm that vaccines were inadequately studied and their potential dangers underexplored. Specifically, she criticized scientific and health organizations for never doing a randomized clinical trial — considered the gold standard for scientific evidence — of the DTP vaccine’s effects on girls, despite the warning signs that she and Aaby had documented in Guinea-Bissau.

As Strøm hunted through clinical trials, she made a startling discovery. Aaby, himself, had conducted a randomized clinical trial of the DTP vaccine in Guinea-Bissau from 2005 to 2011 that had enrolled more than 6,000 children, but had never published the results.

As Vestergård reported this out, Stabell Benn and Aaby produced a series of shifting explanations for their delayed publication. But the revelation that they had withheld data for close to 14 years broke as a true scientific scandal in Denmark. Vestergård realized she was on to a “bigger story about a hypothesis that is being oversold and a spinning of scientific results,” as she tells Rolling Stone.

When Stabell Benn finally did post partial results last March on her LinkedIn, under pressure from the Weekendavisen articles, she claimed that the data could neither support nor refute their theory of increased female mortality from the DTP vaccine.

THOUGH PROOF REMAINED ELUSIVE, Aaby and Stabell Benn’s larger hypothesis — that vaccines produced as-yet-unknown effects in the body that required more, better, or different studies — had become a key pretext for Kennedy’s overhaul of U.S. vaccine policy.

Emails reveal that Stabell Benn’s conversations with Kennedy’s associates tracked almost to the day with the administration’s controversial deliberations over whether to no longer recommend that every newborn get a hepatitis B birth dose.

In early June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the crucial Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the CDC on what vaccinations to recommend, and replaced them with members more closely aligned with his views.

The new ACIP committee met for the first time on Sept. 18, in a meeting that “devolved into confusion and near chaos,” according to The New York Times, as the members deliberated over whether to stop universally recommending the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose. The vote was postponed.

But it appears that Stabell Benn had submitted her first funding request to HHS the day before, on Sept. 17, as referenced by a CDC official in a later email to Stabell Benn. In one email attachment, a copy of the trial protocol — which has since been leaked online — is dated Sept. 18.

On Sept. 19, the ACIP committee — mired in confusion on its second day of deliberations — disbanded without voting on whether to pull back the recommended hepatitis B birth dose. But HHS officials have argued — against strenuous medical input — that U.S. screening adequately detects hepatitis B infections in pregnant mothers, and while those newborns must get a birth dose and followup vaccinations, families should decide for themselves when no infection is detected.

On Oct. 3, with her reputation under attack in Denmark, Stabell Benn sent a detailed email to HHS official Lyn Redwood, who had previously served as president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Kennedy. Appearing to resume a conversation by beginning her email with the words “Dear Lyn, Something else,” she confidently detailed the hepatitis B study proposal and wrote in bold, “Our biggest challenge is securing the funding.”

She explained that the Pershing Square Foundation — established by billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman — had pledged $1.8 million, provided they could raise the same amount within the month. “I would be grateful for any suggestions you may have on how to secure funding for this important trial.” (Foundation officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

It is not clear how Redwood responded. But in a Nov. 12 email, the director of the CDC’s Office of Grants Services advised Stabell Benn that HHS had forwarded her funding request to CDC, where “all unsolicited proposals are reviewed and evaluated for funding consideration by both the Office of Financial Resources and appropriate subject matter experts.”

Two days later, on Nov. 14, Stabell Benn had emailed the CDC grant official and copied both Stuart Burns and three officials from Ackman’s foundation, “so we are all on the same page.”

Stabell Benn also laid bare the logic of the trial, implicitly pointing to the ethical quagmire. “The Guinean government has decided to implement hepatitis B vaccine at birth, but it will only be implemented in 2027.” That would give them a year in which not giving the birth dose would still meet the Guinean government’s standard of care, she explained, writing, “The sooner we can get started, the better the trial.”

In a little over an hour, Burns replied to Stabell Benn that her study was a “funding priority.”  An HHS official familiar with the events says that the agency was moving swiftly because the outside funder, Pershing Square Foundation, had set a deadline for the researchers to obtain matching funds.

In Denmark, vaccine researcher Anders Hviid gives little credence to the idea that Stabell Benn’s study was somehow unsolicited. Kennedy’s “fingerprints are all over it,” he says, pointing to the study’s stated objective to examine secondary outcomes such as eczema and neurological disorders. “It makes absolutely no sense to study associations between this vaccine and these outcomes,” except that’s what interests Kennedy.

Medical experts throughout the world have denounced the study for knowingly not providing a lifesaving intervention to one set of children. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has denounced the study as Kennedy’s “own Tuskegee experiment,” referencing the infamous U.S. medical study that withheld antibiotics to Black sharecroppers infected with syphilis, tells Rolling Stone, “Here is a resource-poor country where roughly 11 percent of children less than 18 months of age have hepatitis B. Enter RFK Jr., who sees this as a golden opportunity to prove one of his theories.”

Meanwhile, most Danish doctors are continuing to follow the science. In 2024, all of the nation’s hepatitis B hospital units wrote to Danish health authorities, urging them to add hepatitis B vaccines to the vaccination schedule.