Policy
Medical Establishment Mounts PR Blitz Amid Reports CDC Plans to Scrap Hep B Vaccine for Newborns
In advance of Thursday’s meeting of CDC vaccine advisers, authors of an op-ed published today in JAMA warned that removing the recommendation to give all newborns the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine within 24 hours of birth could reverse decades of progress in preventing perinatal infections in the U.S. Scientists told The Defender the recommendation comes with more risks than benefits.
The authors of an op-ed published today in JAMA warned that removing the recommendation to give all newborns the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine within 24 hours of birth could reverse decades of progress in preventing perinatal infections in the U.S.
Eliminating the birth dose for the more than 99% of children born to mothers who test negative for hepatitis B would increase the number of cases in infants nationally by 49 per year, according to the model developed by the authors.
Despite this small projected increase, the authors concluded, “Universal birth dose recommendations provide a critical safety net for infants and remain a cornerstone of the US strategy to eliminate hepatitis B.”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Michael Abers, who worked on COVID-19 at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Angela Ulrich, Ph.D., researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), a mouthpiece for the mainstream health establishment, wrote the article.
The op-ed comes ahead of a key Dec. 4-5 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Committee members are expected to vote on changing the longstanding recommendation that all infants receive the first Hep B vaccine dose at birth.
Under the anticipated proposal — the actual voting language has not been made public — infants born to mothers who test negative for hepatitis B during pregnancy would no longer receive the vaccine until they are at least 1 month old.
Legacy media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and other media outlets, have also run a series of articles defending the Hep B vaccine as safe, effective and necessary for every baby born in the U.S.
Some news organizations also warned that any changes to the recommendation could “further erode Americans’ confidence in immunization.”
They framed the modest proposed schedule change as something pushed by “anti-vaxxers,” and have run hit pieces on possible meeting presenters.
On Tuesday, the Vaccine Integrity Project — a CIDRAP initiative — published a review that made headlines, claiming that postponing the shot provides no benefits and poses a serious risk. It was also authored by Walensky and Ulrich, among others.
‘They want to frame this as a universal issue, but it isn’t’
The authors of the JAMA op-ed claimed the universal Hep B birth dose has helped drive infant hepatitis B virus infections to historically low levels.
Hepatitis B is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis B virus, which can range from a mild, short-term, acute illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, long-term, chronic infection. It is transmitted through bodily fluids, most often via intimate contact, including sex or sharing intravenous (IV) drug equipment.
Infected pregnant mothers can also pass the disease to their infants. However, less than half of 1% of pregnant mothers have hepatitis B, and annually, about 625 of them pass it to their infants, according to the op-ed.
To prevent these cases, the authors argue that universal vaccination of all the approximately 3.6 million infants born in the U.S. each year is the only effective option.
Dr. Monique Yohanan, senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women, told The Defender that to justify their argument for universal vaccination, the authors overstate the risk to the general public.
In their introduction, they warn that the hepatitis B virus also maintains infectiousness on surfaces for up to a week. But Yohanan refuted that. “There are no cases of an infant ever getting hepatitis B in this way,” she said. Infants don’t get hepatitis B from countertops. “They get it from moms who have an undiagnosed infection.”
She said that strategy is “fearmongering” to make the general public afraid of the disease, whereas the mothers whose babies are at risk come from a specific subsection of the population — about 70% are immigrant mothers from countries where the illness is endemic, and about 30% are IV drug users.
She proposed that a more compassionate policy for high-risk mothers would be to identify their illnesses early through testing — at immigration points of entry, or when drug users are hospitalized.
“They want to frame this as a universal issue, but it isn’t,” she said. “I think people forget vaccines are different from every other medical intervention because we give them to healthy kids and we give them at a scale that we don’t do for adult vaccines.”
Yohanan said the Hep B vaccine doesn’t build herd immunity, it only protects the individual and it is given to kids who aren’t at risk. “I think the authors ignore the fact that no vaccine is at zero risk and there have been real kids who have been hurt by it,” Yohanan said.
Even though the vaccine may be generally safe, she said, “when you do a medical intervention at scale that doesn’t create herd immunity, it becomes very difficult for me to justify from an ethical standpoint any child who’s hurt.”
Modeling suggests cases could rise in 10s to 100s if policy changes
Using national birth and infection data, the authors of the JAMA op-ed estimated that the current universal birth-dose policy prevents most perinatal hepatitis B virus transmission. Today, an estimated 625 infants acquire hepatitis B at or around birth annually.
Their model predicts that if the birth dose were eliminated for infants whose mothers test negative for hepatitis B, infant infections would increase from 625 to 674 cases per year — 49 more cases, an 8% increase.
The model predicts that if the birth dose were given only to infants whose mothers test positive for hepatitis B, infections would increase to 1,101 cases annually — 476 more cases, a 76% increase.
They theorized that cases would rise due to false-negative prenatal screening, acute maternal infection after screening and infants born to unscreened mothers.
However, according to ACIP members who spoke during the committee’s last meeting, the latter two issues would be eliminated if mothers were tested in the hospital when they give birth.
Yohanan said there are fewer false negatives in today’s era of electronic health records than there were when the universal recommendation was first issued in 1991. Those records provide information about previous infection or about risk factors.
For example, IV drug users often have a history of hospital visits due to complications from drug use. Also, today, tests return results quickly, and women with negative tests could be immediately retested if there is a concern.
Children’s Health Defense Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski said the authors are making an argument for “uninformed decision-making.” They want to “vaccinate everyone without regard for test results,” he said. “The authors believe that the 99.62% of babies born to hepatitis B-free mothers should be vaccinated, assaulting their bodies with antigens and adjuvants in vain.“
He said the authors’ conclusions — and the mainstream public health apparatus generally — are “so narrowly focused on vaccination that they miss the more obvious intervention — testing.”
Jablonowski said:
“If the goal is to maximize vaccinations, call for universal vaccination, as the authors did. If the goal is to minimize disease, call for universal testing. For a fraction of the cost of a vaccine regimen, the mother could be tested at the bedside and have results in 20 minutes, like in many other countries.”
“Universal testing doesn’t net nearly as much profit as universal vaccination,” he added.
The Hep B vaccine market, valued at more than $8 billion in 2023, is projected to grow to over $13 billion by 2032, with the U.S. making up the largest market for the vaccine, Fortune Business Insights reported.
Aluminum, the elephant in the room
Hep B vaccine promoters, and the authors of the JAMA op-ed, justify their conclusions by claiming that there is extensive evidence demonstrating the vaccine’s safety and efficacy when administered shortly after birth, referencing their own CIDRAP paper, published Tuesday.
Yohanan said they never even mention the biggest safety concern — aluminum.
She said the Hep B vaccine is the largest contributor to the aluminum load from vaccines in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world. An infant dose of either U.S.-available Hep B vaccine contains 0.25 milligrams of aluminum hydroxide or amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate.
The CDC’s own research has linked aluminum in vaccines to asthma, she said.
Animal studies have shown that the doses of aluminum that children are exposed to in the U.S. are linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, she said — yet the CDC hasn’t studied the issue.
The much-cited Danish study published earlier this year, which identified no safety issues associated with aluminum in vaccines, didn’t analyze aluminum at the levels U.S. children are exposed to.
Jablonowski said that aluminum is a known neurotoxin, toxic to all forms of life. “When aluminum gets past the blood-brain barrier, there is no easy way back out, it is essentially stuck there,” he said. “That means there is neurotoxin — incompatible with life — stuck in the brains of children during a delicate time of development.”
Yohanan said there are many documented cases in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program of children who received compensation after experiencing serious adverse events from the Hep B vaccine.
In a Substack post, Toby Rogers, Ph.D., noted that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS, known to significantly undercount vaccine injuries, shows 620 deaths and 15,110 total injuries among children ages 5 and younger.
Does it make sense to delay the Hep B vaccine until babies are 1 month old?
On Thursday, ACIP may vote to postpone the birth dose to age 1 month. However, President Donald Trump has made public comments suggesting the shot should be delayed until age 12.
Yohanan said Trump’s recommendation makes more sense. Vaccinating healthy children against hepatitis B at birth, or at 1 month, is what she calls a “temporal mismatch.” They get the shot two decades before most people become infected, risking side effects for young children and the problem of waning immunity.
Rogers wrote that there is no data showing safety or efficacy of the vaccine at either 1 month or 12 years of age.
“If hepatitis B vaccines are to be used at all, they should be properly tested and returned to that original purpose and that intended market,” he wrote. “The idea of administering hepatitis B vaccines to nearly the entire childhood population is self-evident madness.”
Related articles in The Defender- CDC Plan to Review Hep B Vaccine for Babies Sends Mainstream Media into Tailspin
- CDC Vaccine Advisers May Roll Back Recommendation for Hep B Shot at Birth
- Hep B Vaccines Come With High Risk, Little Benefit — Why Does CDC Recommend Them for Every Newborn?
- Key Takeaways From Last Week’s Meeting of New CDC Vaccine Advisers
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