A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel voted Friday to abandon its longtime recommendation that every newborn get a dose of the vaccine for hepatitis B, a decision likely to impact residents in the Bay Area, where more than 100,000 people are living with the virus.
Medical associations and doctors who are experts in the treatment of hepatitis B — a preventable infection that can lead to chronic cases, liver cancer and liver disease — condemned the decision by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The panel voted Friday to recommend the shot only for babies whose mothers have hepatitis B.
“We’re rolling back a 30-year-old, cancer-preventing birth-dose policy with decades of reassuring safety data and no evidence of harm from the vaccine itself,” Jake Scott, a Stanford University associate professor in the division of infectious diseases, said on X. “That’s a reckless and dangerous way to make vaccine policy in the U.S.”
The hepatitis B vaccine is a three-dose course. The virus is usually passed from mother to child, and the CDC began recommending in the 1990s that every newborn receive the first dose of the vaccine. With that policy, transmission of hepatitis B plummeted, and researchers estimate that millions of hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S. were prevented.
President Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a skeptic of vaccines who said that the hepatitis B shot is a “likely culprit” of autism. Kennedy asserts that a link exists between childhood vaccination and autism, without evidence. Earlier this year, Kennedy fired the members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, and some of his replacements are similarly skeptical of vaccine safety but lack the qualifications to be considered experts in the medical community.
Experts in other states said hepatitis B vaccination rates for children could fall. That will remain to be seen in California.
The state’s public health experts have shown a willingness to buck the CDC’s new vaccine-skeptic tilt and make their own health recommendations. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, added the state to the West Coast Health Alliance in the fall, an association with neighboring Democratic states that evaluates and makes its own vaccine recommendations.
The blue-state alliance maintained the recommendation that adults and children get vaccinated to protect against COVID-19 after the CDC’s advisory panel rescinded its recommendation in September. It wasn’t clear Friday morning how the alliance would respond to the panel’s revoked recommendation for the hepatitis B dose; spokespersons for Newsom’s office and the California Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to a comment request.
Some counties in the Bay Area, where Asian Americans and immigrants are disproportionately affected by hepatitis B, were waiting Friday to see how the state’s public health experts respond.
“The directions that we follow emanate from the state and the Western Alliance for vaccines,” said Preston Merchant, a spokesperson for San Mateo County’s public health department. “We would expect the California Department of Health to issue a statement, and we would follow that.”
Sarah Rudman, chief of the Santa Clara County public health department, said Thursday that the county would look to the health alliance but ultimately make its own decision whether to keep the birth dose recommendation. Rudman said vaccination rates are currently high in the county, and medical providers will rely on the best science when informing patients.