A Danish Couple’s Maverick African Research Finds Its Moment in RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policy

一对丹麦夫妇的非主流非洲研究，在小罗伯特·肯尼迪的疫苗政策中找到了“高光时刻”

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. 1996年，对于初出茅庐的儿科医生隆·格拉夫·斯滕斯巴勒（Lone Graff Stensballe）来说，几内亚比绍似乎是一个理想的研究基地。她的导师、同为丹麦人的彼得·阿比（Peter Aaby）已经在该国首都的泥砖房中，花了近二十年时间收集了10万人的数据。

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. 阿比和他的伴侣克里斯汀·斯塔贝尔·本（Christine Stabell Benn）认为，在这个贫困国家多年的研究让他们在疫苗领域有了重大发现，即他们所描述的“非特异性效应”：他们声称，源自减毒活病毒和细菌的麻疹和结核病疫苗，除了预防这些特定病原体外，还能提高儿童的存活率。

But, the scientists said, shots made from deactivated whole germs, or pieces of them, such as the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) shot, caused more deaths—especially in little girls—than getting no vaccine at all. 但这两位科学家表示，由灭活全病菌或其片段制成的疫苗（如白喉-破伤风-百日咳疫苗，即DTP疫苗）反而会导致更多的死亡——尤其是在女童中——其死亡率甚至高于不接种任何疫苗的情况。

The World Health Organization repeatedly and inconclusively examined these astonishing findings. They tended to elicit shrugs from other global health researchers, who found Aaby’s research techniques unusual and his results generally impossible to replicate. 世界卫生组织曾多次审查这些惊人的发现，但均未得出定论。其他全球卫生研究人员对此往往不以为然，他们认为阿比的研究方法不同寻常，且其结果通常无法被复现。

Then came Donald Trump, Covid, and the administrative reign of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 随后，唐纳德·特朗普上台，新冠疫情爆发，反疫苗倡导者小罗伯特·肯尼迪（Robert F. Kennedy Jr.）开始掌管相关行政事务。

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 effects,” their team wrote in a 2023 review. 突然之间，阿比和本不再只是从地球遥远的角落发出微弱的信号。他们开始自信地在网络和医学期刊上发表观点和政策建议。他们的团队在2023年的一篇综述中写道，疫苗的“测试、批准和监管”框架“需要更新，以纳入非特异性效应”。

And the Trump administration has taken notice. 特朗普政府已经注意到了这一点。

“They became more strident in saying that their findings were real and that the world needed to do something about it,” said Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University vaccinologist who has been aware of Aaby’s work since the 1990s. “And they became more aligned with RFK.” “他们变得更加强硬，声称他们的发现是真实的，世界必须对此采取行动，”自20世纪90年代起就关注阿比研究的范德比尔特大学疫苗学家凯瑟琳·爱德华兹（Kathryn Edwards）说，“而且他们与小肯尼迪的立场也更加一致了。”

Kennedy, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, cited one of Aaby’s papers to justify slashing $2.6 billion in US support for Gavi, a global alliance of vaccination initiatives. The cut could result in 1.2 million preventable deaths over five years in the world’s poorest countries, the nonprofit agency has estimated. Kennedy has frozen $600 million in current Gavi funding over largely debunked vaccine safety claims. 作为美国卫生与公众服务部（HHS）部长，小肯尼迪引用了阿比的一篇论文，为削减美国对全球疫苗免疫联盟（Gavi）的26亿美元援助提供了理由。该非营利机构估计，这一削减可能导致全球最贫困国家在五年内出现120万例可预防的死亡。小肯尼迪还以基本已被证伪的疫苗安全声明为由，冻结了Gavi目前6亿美元的资金。

Kennedy described the 2017 paper as a “landmark study” by “five highly regarded mainstream vaccine experts” that found that girls who received a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, or DTP, shot were 10 times more likely to die from all causes than unvaccinated children. 小肯尼迪将这篇2017年的论文描述为由“五位备受推崇的主流疫苗专家”撰写的“里程碑式研究”，该研究发现，接种过白喉-破伤风-百日咳（DTP）疫苗的女童，因各种原因死亡的概率是未接种疫苗儿童的10倍。

In fact, the study was far too small to confidently make such assertions, as Benn acknowledged. In a study of historical data that included 535 girls, four of those vaccinated against DTP in a three-month period of infancy died of unrelated causes, while one unvaccinated girl died during that period. A follow-up published by the same group in 2022 found that the DTP shot by itself had no effect on mortality. Critics say the 2017 study, rather than being a landmark, exemplified the troubling shortfalls they perceive in the Danish team’s research. 事实上，正如本本人所承认的那样，该研究的样本量太小，不足以支撑如此断言。在一项包含535名女童的历史数据研究中，在婴儿期三个月内接种DTP疫苗的女孩中有四人死于无关原因，而同期未接种疫苗的女孩中有一人死亡。该团队在2022年发表的后续研究发现，DTP疫苗本身对死亡率没有影响。批评人士认为，2017年的这项研究非但不是里程碑，反而体现了他们眼中丹麦团队研究中令人担忧的缺陷。

As Aaby and Benn’s US profile has risen, scientists in Denmark have set upon the work of their compatriots. In news and journal articles published over the past 18 months, Danish statisticians and infectious disease experts have said the duo’s methods were unorthodox, even shoddy, and were structured to support preconceived views. A national scientific board is investigating their work. 随着阿比和本在美国的知名度上升，丹麦的科学家们开始审视他们同胞的工作。在过去18个月发表的新闻和期刊文章中，丹麦的统计学家和传染病专家指出，这两人的研究方法非正统，甚至粗制滥造，其结构旨在支持预设的观点。目前，一个国家科学委员会正在调查他们的工作。

Stensballe, who worked with Aaby and Benn for 20 years, has been among those voicing doubts. 曾与阿比和本共事20年的斯滕斯巴勒，也是提出质疑的人之一。

“It took years to see what I see clearly today, that there is a strange concerning pattern in their work,” Stensballe 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—favoring interpretations that fit their hypotheses. “我花了多年时间才看清今天所看到的一切，即他们的工作中存在一种奇怪且令人担忧的模式，”斯滕斯巴勒在哥本哈根接受电话采访时说。她在该市最大的教学医院——哥本哈根大学医院（Rigshospitalet）为儿童提供治疗。她表示，他们的工作充满了确认偏误——即倾向于采纳符合其假设的解释。

Those hypotheses overlap, in important areas, with the notions of Kennedy and other vaccine-skeptical officials at HHS. 这些假设在重要领域与小肯尼迪及卫生与公众服务部其他持疫苗怀疑论的官员的观点不谋而合。

In December, HHS announced the agency would award the Bandim group $1.6 million to study whether the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine weakens babies’ immune systems or causes neurological issues. 去年12月，卫生与公众服务部宣布将向“班迪姆小组”（Bandim group）拨款160万美元，用于研究乙肝疫苗出生剂量是否会削弱婴儿免疫系统或导致神经系统问题。

The researchers plan to withhold the vaccine from half of the 14,000 newborns in the study, although the long-established vaccine is 90 percent effective in preventing infection. The Bandim group justifies this decision by noting that impoverished Guinea-Bissau does not yet routinely vaccinate infants against hepatitis B. Given that 1 in 5 Guinea-Bissauan adults carry the hepatitis B virus, however, the WHO and many infectious disease specialists say it is unethical to withhold the birth dose. 研究人员计划在1.4万名新生儿中，对其中一半不予接种该疫苗，尽管这种历史悠久的疫苗在预防感染方面的有效率高达90%。班迪姆小组为这一决定辩解称，贫困的几内亚比绍尚未对婴儿进行乙肝疫苗的常规接种。然而，考虑到每5名几内亚比绍成年人中就有1人携带乙肝病毒，世界卫生组织和许多传染病专家认为，拒绝提供出生剂量疫苗是不道德的。

Aaby and Benn did not respond to repeated requests for comment. They have vigorously defended their work elsewhere. 阿比和本没有回应多次置评请求。他们在其他场合曾极力为自己的工作辩护。

A Mixed Reputation / 毁誉参半的声誉

Many Danes admire the two for their decades of work in Guinea-Bissau, a nation of over 2 million people where, as in much of Africa, infant mortality has plunged over the past five decades. There’s even a novel, the 2013 Danish thriller The Arc of the Swallow, featuring a corporate plot to murder a scientist character clearly based on Aaby. The company’s goal: to keep him from publishing data showing deadly effects from the DTP shot. Benn has said she gave the author the idea for the book. 许多丹麦人钦佩这两人在几内亚比绍几十年的工作。几内亚比绍拥有200多万人口，和非洲大部分地区一样，过去五十年来该国的婴儿死亡率大幅下降。甚至还有一部2013年的丹麦惊悚小说《燕子之弧》（The Arc of the Swallow），书中讲述了一个企业阴谋谋杀一名科学家的故事，该角色显然是以阿比为原型。企业的目的是阻止他发表显示DTP疫苗具有致命副作用的数据。本曾表示，是她为作者提供了这本书的构思。

Aaby and Benn have trained around 50 scientists through their Bandim Health Project, named for a district of Bissau, Guinea-Bissau’s capital. The research group has published over 1,000 academic papers and won scientific prizes. The Danish king knighted Benn last year. Their notion of non-specific vaccine effects gained enough traction to merit a short chapter in the 2023 edition of Plotkin’s Vaccines, the authoritative text of vaccinology. 阿比和本通过以几内亚比绍首都比绍的一个区命名的“班迪姆健康项目”（Bandim Health Project），培养了约50名科学家。该研究小组发表了1000多篇学术论文，并获得过科学奖项。丹麦国王去年授予了本爵位。他们关于疫苗非特异性效应的观点获得了足够的关注，以至于在疫苗学权威教材《普洛特金疫苗学》（Plotkin’s Vaccines）2023年版中占据了一个简短的章节。

Yet Danish health authorities have never followed Aaby and Benn’s vacc… 然而，丹麦卫生当局从未采纳阿比和本的疫苗……