MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In a historic vote, vaccine advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention have stopped recommending that all babies get a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. The vote was contentious. It is strongly opposed by most of the medical community. NPR's Pien Huang has been watching. Hey, Pien.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: OK, so this is the CDC's vaccine advisory committee. What prompted them to change the policy?
HUANG: So earlier this year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all the previous members from the panel, and he handpicked his own, many of whom, like Kennedy, have long questioned the safety of vaccines that have long been in use. So the hepatitis B vaccine is among the first vaccines they're reviewing on the schedule, and the committee cited concerns from some parents and also said that other comparable countries don't give hepatitis B vaccines so early. Here in the U.S., they've been recommended for all healthy newborns for over 30 years, and that policy is credited with dramatically reducing liver disease. Since the '90s, annual hep B infections in infants and children have dropped by 99%.
KELLY: And yet they've voted to stop all vaccinations?
HUANG: To stop recommending it for every baby. They still recommend it for babies whose mothers test positive for hep B or whose status is not known. But now, mothers who test negative should talk it over with their doctor. Some members who supported the change did it for parental choice. Here's Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT.
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RETSEF LEVI: The intention behind this that parents should carefully think about whether they want to take the risk of giving another vaccine to their child. And many of them might decide that they want to wait far more than two months, maybe years and maybe up to adulthood.
HUANG: But a CDC official pointed out that this has always been a recommendation and not a vaccine mandate. Still, Levi was 1 of 8 members who voted for the change. There were three members that opposed it. Pediatrician Cody Meissner from Dartmouth said it went against his oath as a doctor to do no harm.
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CODY MEISSNER: Thoughtful inquiry is always commendable. But that inquiry should not be confused with baseless skepticism.
HUANG: Many medical professionals also spoke against the vote at the meeting.
KELLY: OK, just to emphasize, this was a vote by the advisory committee. It's not binding, so what happens now?
HUANG: Yeah, so now it's up to the CDC's acting director to decide whether to accept the guidance as policy, and that's a move that could take hours or weeks. We're not sure yet.
KELLY: Got it. Beyond the committee, beyond the CDC, how are folks you're speaking to responding?
HUANG: So many in the medical and public health communities are very upset about the vote, and they're worried about its likely impacts on health. Now, that is, even though with this change, the hepatitis B vaccine should still be covered for free for any parent who wants it for their child. But Dr. Su Wang, a physician in New Jersey and a hepatitis B advocate, says it will sow chaos. Fewer babies will be vaccinated.
SU WANG: And years down the road, we are going to see that really nice decline we had with getting acute hepatitis B and chronic hep B cases down - we're going to see it go back up again, and we're going to see rises of liver cancer. And so this is really a travesty.
HUANG: Those in public health also see it as part of a broader push by Secretary Kennedy to undermine vaccines and discourage people from getting them, even though the evidence in the safety record has not changed. There are signs of that in some of the other topics there.
KELLY: Other topics - OK, give me one or two sentences on what other topics were.
HUANG: Yeah, sure. So the panel heard from Aaron Siri, who's a lawyer who's suing HHS. He questions the safety of many common childhood vaccines and called for ending vaccine mandates. And they also questioned the safety of aluminum-based additives to vaccines that have been used for almost 100 years.
KELLY: NPR's Pien Huang. Thank you, Pien.
HUANG: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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