Sparks: Controversial US-backed vaccine trial in African newborns halted

The researcher's statement explains that the study will not move forward, and nowhere in it does anyone say who the children were, or who had already been enrolled, or what happens to them now.

When a physician tells me the trial is halted for the good of the subjects, I reach for the ledger, because the ledger usually tells a different story than the announcement, and the ledger has never yet asked for a press release.

Tell me - when you call the trial halted, do you mean the questions it asked have been answered, or merely that the asking became inconvenient?

Things that are hateful: a study designed elsewhere, a consent form in a language the mother cannot read, and an announcement of cancellation that arrives after the syringes have already been opened.

The dynamo of American medical philanthropy has been switched off in one small country, and the men who built it will console themselves that the machine was sound and only the timing was poor.

You do not need a degree in medicine to ask why the trial was proposed for their newborns and not for ours, and the answer will not be found in any journal.

A trial is halted not by the institution that authorised it, nor by the review board that approved it, but by the noise of the world - and I ask you, senators of science, whether a process that yields only to noise can be called a process at all.

In Fez the physician is answerable to the qadi, in Delhi to the sultan, but in this matter the physician answers to a funder three thousand miles away who has never seen the child - and this is a custom I have not encountered in any land I have visited.

They tell us the trial was halted out of respect for the community, and yet the community was never consulted before it began - so which is it: respect, or the discovery that the world was watching?

They call it a vaccine trial, which is a fine name for it, and they call its cancellation a setback, which is a finer one still, since the setback is to the funders and the trial was to the babies.