Shift on hep B shot guide seen as risky

For most American infants, the hepatitis B shot comes just before their first bath, in the blur of pokes, prods and pictures that attend a 21st century hospital delivery.

- BY SONJA SHARP

BEN GRAY Associated Press THE CDC advisory panel meets Dec. 5 to consider changes in infants' hepatitis B vaccine recommendations.

But as of last week, thousands of newborns across the U.S. will no longer receive the initial inoculation for hepatitis B—the first in a litany of childhood vaccinations and the top defense against one of the world’s deadliest cancers.

On Dec. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s powerful vaccine advisory panel voted to nix the decades-old birth-dose recommendation.

The change was pushed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has long sought to rewrite the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule and unwind state immunization requirements for kindergarten.

California officials have vowed to keep the state's current guidelines in place, but the federal changes could threaten vaccine coverage by some insurers and public benefits programs, along with broader reverberations.

“It’s a gateway,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist in Los Angeles. “It’s not just hepatitis B — it’s chipping away at the entire schedule.”

Democratic-led states and blue-chip insurance companies have scrambled to shore up access.

California joined Hawaii, Oregon and Washington in forming the West Coast Health Alliance to maintain uniform public policy on vaccines in the face of official “misand disinformation.”“Universal hepatitis B vaccinations at birth save lives, and walking away from this science is reckless,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “The Trump administration's ideological politics continue to drive increasingly high costs — for parents, for newborns, and for our entire public-health system.”

The issue is also tied up in court.