Dr. Robert Malone speaks during a meeting of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at CDC headquarters December 4, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
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Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Vaccine advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unexpectedly postponed controversial votes Thursday on changes to the current recommendation to universally immunize newborns against hepatitis B. Confusion and disagreement over the language of the votes led the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, to push them back until Friday.
The committee meeting was marked by unusual conflict and chaos.
“This is the third version of the questions we’ve received in 72 hours, and we’re trying to assess a moving target,” said Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and voting member of the committee. “I object to the characterization that ACIP members were consulted in the development of these questions.”
The vote aimed to end a long-standing recommendation to vaccinate all healthy newborns against hepatitis B, regardless of whether the mother tests positive or negative for the virus. But the language of the vote was changed between the time it was released Friday morning and early afternoon and some members of the group wanted more time to review it in writing.
The current recommendation aims to ensure that no at-risk infant falls through the cracks and provide lifelong protection to all U.S. children against the hepatitis B virus, which can cause serious, life-threatening health problems. It is the cornerstone of a decades-long strategy to eliminate hepatitis B in the United States.
Hepatitis B, which is often spread through sexual contact and drug use, can be passed from mothers to infants during childbirth and during early childhood through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, such as their blood.
The virus attacks the liver and chronic infection can lead to liver cancer, cirrhosis and death. The risks of these consequences are much higher for people infected as infants. There is no cure.
During Thursday’s discussion, there was a pronounced division between some participants who spoke in favor of changing the recommendation and others who opposed it.
Food and Drug Administration representative Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg questioned the need for the current universal policy.
“Babies born without high risk factors, without an antigen-positive mother, without a family member with hepatitis B — for those babies, the potential for benefit is so low,” said Høeg, who was named acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research on Thursday. “Why are we saying it is absolutely necessary to give this dose at birth, but high-income countries around the world are not doing it?”
Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, defended the current policy.
“This disease has declined in the United States, thanks to the effectiveness of our current vaccination program,” said Meissner, who is the only current member to have served on the committee in the past. When another advisor, Robert Malone, a vaccinologist and biochemist, challenged him to consider this statement his “opinion,” he responded, “Those are facts, Robert. »
Non-voting liaisons to health professional groups have spoken out against the process, which deviates from how ACIP normally operates.
“As physicians, your ethical obligation is to ‘first do no harm,’ and you are failing by promoting this anti-vaccine agenda without the data and evidence necessary to make these informed decisions,” said Dr. Jason Goldman, liaison for the American College of Physicians. “Your job as a committee is to look at the totality of risks and benefits, harms and fairness, which you have failed to do.”
This postponement leads to a busy schedule on Friday. Besides voting to change hepatitis B policy, the committee is expected to discuss how the U.S. vaccination schedule compares to other countries and the links between aluminum — an ingredient used in more than a dozen vaccines to make them more effective — and asthma.
Most health professionals say there is no solid evidence that aluminum adjuvants are dangerous and that they pose no real problems.
Many public health experts fear that the steps taken this week are part of a concerted effort to undermine access to vaccines in the United States.
The CDC advisory committee wields enormous power because its recommendations influence how doctors vaccinate patients and dictate whether insurance companies pay for vaccines.
But the committee has lost the trust of most mainstream medical groups since Kennedy replaced its members in June with his own list. The committee also abandoned longstanding collaborations with medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and relied less on the experience of CDC experts.
