A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week.

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It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.

At an anti-vaccine conference last month, Kennedy praised the Danish researchers behind the trial and touted US-supported research on hepatitis B in newborns as exemplifying the Trump administration’s agenda for vaccines, which has included slashing vaccine recommendations and casting doubt on the safety and effectiveness of shots.

Kennedy “wants to make it so we don’t use a birth dose here in this country,” said Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That’s the goal.”

Kennedy would never be able to do the trial in the US because of its significant ethical concerns, Offit added.

“He’s taking advantage of a developing country … Is it because children in Africa are more expendable than children here?”

Danish researchers plan to enroll 14,000 infants in Guinea-Bissau in the trial, giving the hepatitis B vaccine to half of the babies at birth and withholding it from the others for the first six weeks of life.

An ethics committee at the researchers’ home institution of the University of Southern Denmark voted this week to proceed with the trial, and officials in Guinea-Bissau have also greenlit the project, which the health minister, Quinhin Nantote, initially said was suspended after international uproar earlier this year.

Stig Børsen Hansen, a founding member who was one of two reviewers who presented the study to the Danish committee, resigned from the group in protest on Friday, citing major ethical issues with the study.

“You are now enrolling newborns in a lottery to test a hypothesis,” Hansen said. The children who are randomly selected not to receive the birth dose of the vaccine, those who “lost the lottery”, face in their earliest days the risk of contracting hepatitis B, which can cause irreversible lifelong damage.

“They contract hepatitis B in the context of being part of a research project,” Hansen said, which made their infection happen, in effect, “by design”.

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