CDC Formally Stops Recommending Hepatitis B Vaccines For All Newborns

Rather than recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now officially begun advising women who test negative for the virus to consult doctors

about whether their babies should get their first doses within 24 hours of birth. The agency’s vaccine advisory committee, whose members Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr was appointed this year after he fired the previous ones, had voted for a recommendation this month. “We are restoring the balance of informed consent to parents whose newborns face little risk of contracting hepatitis B,” Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said in a statement. The CDC, which had been recommending the birth dose of the vaccine, is now being criticized by public health experts for the advisory committee’s decision. The CDC now suggests waiting until at least two months for babies’ first hepatitis B shots if they do not receive the birth dose. However, it still recommends that babies born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B should be administered the vaccine within the first day of their being born.

Secondary recommendation under consideration

The agency is still reviewing a secondary recommendation from the panel, which parents consult with doctors about the possibility of testing children for antibodies to hepatitis B before they decide whether to get second doses of the vaccine. The hepatitis B vaccine is typically administered as a three-dose series. Public health experts delaying this vaccine can lead to a resurgence of infections and possibly more deaths from liver disease or cancer. Pediatric cases of acute hepatitis B have gone down across the country - after the CDC started the recommendations for a universal birth dose, which fell by 99 per cent till 2019. In November, the CDC had altered a webpage that had once unequivocally said vaccines do not cause autism, claiming instead that studies have not ruled out a link, even though decades of research have found no association.

What is hepatitis B?

Hepatitis B is a viral infection that leads to inflammation in your liver. It can be a brief illness that may not cause any symptoms and goes away without treatment. But a few people have a chronic form of the virus, which may lead to cirrhosis and liver failure. There’s no cure for hepatitis B, but there are medications that can make the virus inactive, which means that you have the virus, which may not spread.

What causes hepatitis B?

You get hepatitis B if you are exposed to bodily fluids from someone who has the virus. This can be amniotic fluid, blood, menstrual fluid, saliva, semen, or vaginal fluid. Exposure to bodily fluids can happen if you:

• Share needles or syringes with someone who has the virus
• Have unprotected sex with someone who has it
• Get stuck with a contaminated medical instrument like a scalpel