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

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 (DTP) 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. They tended to elicit shrugs from other global health researchers, who found Aaby’s research techniques unusual and his results generally impossible to replicate. 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 effects,” their team wrote in a 2023 review. And the Trump administration has taken notice. “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.” 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. 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. 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. 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. Stensballe, who worked with Aaby and Benn for 20 years, has been among those voicing doubts. “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.