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Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this morning voted to end a decades-long recommendation that all infants born in the U.S. receive the hepatitis B vaccine (Hep B) within 12-24 hours of birth.
Instead, for babies born to mothers who test negative for hepatitis B, the committee recommends that families determine whether to give their child the Hep B shot at birth through individual decision-making with their physician.
For infants who don’t get the birth dose, the committee recommends the initial dose of the vaccine not be administered until infants are at least 2 months old.
Three of the 11 committee members — Dr. Raymond Pollack, Dr. Cody Meissner and Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln — opposed the recommendation. The remaining eight members supported it.
Andrew Johnson from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assured the committee that the language change will not affect Medicaid or insurance coverage of the vaccine.
For mothers whose hepatitis B status is unknown or who test positive, the birth dose recommendation remains in place.
Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland, a long-time critic of the universal birth dose policy, welcomed the committee’s vote to “end the ill-considered universal recommendation for the Hep B birth vaccine dose.”
Holland added:
“The science behind that universal recommendation was a sham, based on thoroughly inadequate clinical trials. Hundreds of babies unquestionably died because of it. While I question whether any baby should receive a vaccine against a rare disease in infancy, I am pleased that this is now a matter for parents and their healthcare practitioner to decide — not a state mandate based on a federal pharma-backed recommendation.
“And while the ACIP debate on this issue was tedious and rancorous at times, it is an extremely positive change that actual debate about childhood vaccines is occurring in government venues with impact. This is the transparency that Secretary Kennedy promised.”
Dr. Monique Yohanan, senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women, told The Defender there was never “a good science-based reason to have a universal vaccination that 99% of babies born in the United States are not at any risk,” and that the vote was “good news for babies.”
She added that she hoped it would “provide an opportunity to actually have outreach to the moms who are positive for hepatitis B, women who are immigrants, women who are IV drug users.” She said the previous policy was “performative compassion. And these are really underserved women who we ignored the outreach that they needed.”
The committee also voted 6-4 with one abstention that after the initial Hep B shot, parents should consult with healthcare providers to consider whether their child should have a serology test, which would show whether they had antibodies considered sufficient to protect them against the disease.
The committee voted to update the CDC Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program funding to match ACIP’s recommendations. Several committee members, including Meissner and Hibbeln, abstained from voting on the VFC resolution, protesting that they didn’t understand the implications of the vote — reflecting some of the disagreement that pervaded the two-day meeting.
The votes on the Hep B vaccine were originally scheduled for the September meeting, but were deferred to allow the CDC work group to put together more data to inform the committee’s decision.
Today’s vote was postponed from yesterday so members could have more time to review the language of the proposal.
Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's from the University of Texas at Austin.
© [2025] Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
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