by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
The National Institutes of Health awarded $340,000 to test psychological tactics aimed at persuading South African fifth-graders and parents to accept the controversial HPV vaccine, according to documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding research on how to boost the uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine among fifth-grade boys and girls in South Africa, grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act request revealed.
The NIH awarded approximately $340,000 to principal investigators Dr. Ingrid Katz, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, and Lisa Michelle Butler, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut.
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The grant funds a project to develop and test school-based communication strategies targeting children and their parents at schools in the KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, to determine what types of communication are more likely to result in more children getting the HPV vaccine.
The funding covers a one-year pilot feasibility study in five schools to test strategies that the researchers will then refine and test on hundreds of children in a larger, “full-scale hybrid type 2 trial.”
The researchers hope the school-based communications strategies they develop will help increase child and adolescent HPV vaccination uptake in South Africa from the current rate of 37% of girls to the target rate of over 80% of all children ages 9-12.
They hope to later use the same strategy in other low- and middle-income countries to increase their rates as well.
“The HPV vaccines have not been independently evaluated for both safety and efficacy,” said Dr. Shankara Chetty, a general practitioner and natural scientist from KwaZulu-Natal. “As such, no amount of coercive marketing strategies will suffice to honestly inform the recipients in their decision to consent.”
“Seeing that minors are being targeted, it is imperative that the guardians of these minors are given all the current information and, more importantly, made aware of the lack of information on safety and efficacy to make an informed choice,” Chetty said. “This cannot be done by the industry profiting from its rollout.”
Part of $40 million grant initiative to promote HPV shots
CHD in June 2023 identified nearly 50 grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its sub-agencies, including the NIH. The grants, totaling more than $40 million, went to universities, healthcare systems and public health departments to use behavioral psychology strategies to increase HPV vaccine uptake among adolescents.
This is the first grant CHD identified that uses those same methods to target children in Africa.
The research fits into a broader program across HHS institutions that includes hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding to develop and test strategies to increase the uptake of all vaccines among vaccine-hesitant low-income communities and communities of color using “culturally tailored” messaging in the name of “health equity.”
It is also in line with a push to provide substantial grant funding to increase HPV vaccination rates by “raising awareness” and combating “misinformation.”
In addition to satisfying HHS’ goals, the South Africa project responds to a global program laid out in 2020 by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Health Assembly to eradicate cervical cancer as a public health problem worldwide, largely through HPV vaccination.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, last year announced it would invest more than $600 million to reach its goal of vaccinating 86 million girls against HPV in low- and middle-income countries by 2025, largely through national vaccination campaigns.
That announcement coincided with Gavi-supported national vaccination campaigns in Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Eritrea over the past two years.
South Africa was one of the earlier African countries to launch a national school-based vaccination campaign targeted at girls age 9 or older in fourth grade in public schools.
Katz and Butler reported in their grant application that the campaign was initially “successful” but rates have since plummeted, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Merck, which makes the Gardasil HPV vaccine, said it will donate vaccines for the new study. Merck is one of Gavi’s key partners in distributing vaccines in low- and middle-income countries worldwide.
Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, executive director of CHD Africa, told The Defender she was disappointed to see South African researchers collaborating on the project.
She said:
“It is difficult to understand why UKZN [University of KwaZulu-Natal] researchers don’t see this manipulative experiment on children as racist and dehumanizing. The pharmaceutical industry has a horrendous track record in Africa, where pharmacovigilance is weak or non-existent, largely due to pharma funding scientists, regulatory authorities and departments of health. UKZN is no exception. Its funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“I am reminded of behavioral scientists who helped the U.K. government manipulate the public [during the COVID-19 pandemic] and later said we have been systematically ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ throughout the pandemic.”
South Africa project ‘smacks of pharmaceutical imperialism’
Under the $340,000 grant awarded to Katz and Butler, principal investigators will collaborate with a team of psychologists, an education specialist, an epidemiologist and a biomedical engineer from U.S. universities and the UKZN, along with the local department of health and elementary schools in an urban setting in the KwaZulu-Natal province.
The name of the city and schools where the project will be implemented were redacted from the FOIA documents provided to CHD.
Researchers will specifically target “diverse populations” and integrate “the voices of individuals living in low-resource settings” as they try to understand why children don’t take the HPV vaccine and in particular why those numbers declined after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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