On December 5, 2025, RFK Jr.’s newly appointed CDC vaccine panel voted to end the universal recommendation for hepatitis B vaccine at birth. The change was driven by vaccine-skeptical members RFK Jr. appointed to the panel. However, the vaccine has decades of safety data and is proven safe and effective.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, infectious disease experts, and former CDC directors strongly oppose this change. The evidence is clear: before the 1991 birth dose policy, at least 20,000 babies contracted hepatitis B per year in the United States. After the policy, fewer than 20 cases per year got hepatitis B from their mother, a 99.9% reduction! CDC states that “approximately 90% of infants born to HBsAg-positive people in the US will acquire chronic HBV infection, approximately one-fourth of whom will eventually die from chronic liver disease.”
Nelson et al. confirm that “up to 90% of perinatal infections become chronically infected; approximately 20% to 60% of children aged 1 to 5 years become chronically infected, and 5% to 10% of older children and adults.”[sic]
According to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, without vaccination, as many as 9 in 10 infants infected with hepatitis B in their first year of life will develop chronic infection that can lead to liver failure and death.
Therefore, as a result of this decision, we might have another avoidable public health crisis in the United States. When we ignore decades of data and the lived experience of clinicians who have spent entire careers preventing avoidable suffering, we place children at risk who cannot advocate for themselves. Parents deserve guidance that is rooted in science. Newborns deserve protection that has already been proven to save lives.
This reversal will not strengthen public health in the United States. It will weaken it. It will return us to a time when preventable infections moved quietly from mother to child and set infants on a lifelong path toward liver disease, cancer, and premature death. We know how to stop this disease. We have known for more than thirty years. It is a step that will cost lives, and for that reason it must not stand.
