Washington, D.C. — Today, after the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which was reconstituted by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., voted to eliminate the long-standing universal recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, despite decades of evidence showing it prevents lifelong disease, Jill Rosenthal, director of Public Health Policy at the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:
This is a frightening day for children’s health. RFK Jr.’s handpicked ACIP committee members voted today to ignore decades of science, limiting the ability of families to protect their children from preventable diseases. Despite no evidence of vaccine harm, and overwhelming evidence that the birth dose of hepatitis B strongly protects babies from risk of incurable infection, liver disease, liver cancer, and death, the committee arrived at its preconceived and politically motivated conclusions. Its actions are dangerous, stoking distrust in established science, shrinking timely access to the hepatitis B vaccine, and threatening all Americans’ public health and safety.
Rosenthal recently detailed how states can safeguard vaccine access as the Trump administration dismantles federal immunization systems in her latest column, “6 Ways States Can Protect Vaccine Access While the Trump Administration Dismantles the Federal System.”
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