Current US guidelines call for universal hepatitis B vaccination of newborn babies.Credit: Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post/Getty
Members of a top US vaccine advisory panel are scheduled to vote Friday on whether to roll back a decades-old recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine shortly after birth — a measure that has been associated with a sharp decline in mother-to-child transmission of the hepatitis B virus, which causes liver disease.
In discussions on Thursday, some members of the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) raised questions about the ‘birth dose’ of the vaccine. Several members of the panel have expressed criticism of vaccines.
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“What we are doing here is trying to undo some really, really bad decision processes we had in the past,” said ACIP member Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
“We have to look at what is happening now that this programme has been in place for decades,” said ACIP member Evelyn Griffin, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Baton Rouge General Hospital in Louisiana. “Sometimes autoimmune conditions take decades to develop.”
But the US vaccine-safety monitoring system can detect “very, very rare” safety events, Rochelle Walensky, who directed the US Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) from 2021 to 2023 and is now a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, responded at a media briefing. “And over 35 years, with a huge amount of experience and millions of doses given, we have not detected those events.”
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Chronic infection with the hepatitis B virus can cause liver cancer and even death. Since 1991, US public-health officials have recommended vaccinating all healthy babies at birth, a policy that helped to drive down infections1 in people younger than 19 by 99%. But, in September, members of the ACIP, which provides advice to the CDC, started discussing the possibility of delaying the first vaccine dose.
“ACIP will review the evidence at its meeting this week and issue recommendations based on gold-standard, evidence-based science and common sense”, said Emily Hilliard, the press secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC.
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