Instead of recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now officially advises women who test negative for the virus to consult health care providers 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. appointed this year after he fired the previous ones — voted for the recommendation this month, upending more than three decades of agency guidance. Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill accepted the change Tuesday — the final step for it to become the agency’s policy.
“We are restoring the balance of informed consent to parents whose newborns face little risk of contracting hepatitis B,” O'Neill said in a statement.
The CDC had recommended the birth dose of the vaccine since 1991. Many public health experts criticized the advisory committee’s decision: After the meeting, a chorus of doctors, political leaders and health officials called on O’Neill to ignore the suggested change and maintain the CDC’s recommendation, to no avail.
The CDC now suggests waiting until at least 2 months of age 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 or whose infection statuses are unknown get hepatitis B vaccines within the first day of life.
The agency is still reviewing a secondary recommendation from the panel: that parents consult with health care providers 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 given to babies as a three-dose series.
The new policy is one of the most notable examples of the way CDC guidance is diverging from widespread medical consensus. The advisory committee's discussion of hepatitis B vaccines was rife with misinformation and cherry-picked data, and it ignored decades of evidence that hepatitis B vaccines are safe and effective when they are given shortly after birth.
Comment: That's rich coming from NBC which has long been part of the Big Pharma Cartel and routinely covering up vaccine damage and decades of death and ill health inflicted on infants and teens. Finally, the CDC is being transformed into an institution that is not an arm of Pharmaceutical profits and corrupt science. And oh boy, they can't stand that. See: Vax-Unvax Study of Mice Implicates Hepatitis B Vaccine—Media Silent
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