WASHINGTON, DC – Experts appointed by the Trump administration’s vaccine-skeptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr are expected to review newborn hepatitis B vaccines on Thursday (Friday, Manila time), considering whether to delay the shots despite opposition from many doctors.
The newly anointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices members are slated to meet for two days in Atlanta, Georgia, to follow-up on a September meeting that resulted in new recommendations for COVID-19 and measles vaccinations.
Under Kennedy, ACIP has initiated a broad review of the safety of several vaccines, some of which have been in use for decades.
The shift led by the nation’s health chief — who has long voiced anti-vaccine rhetoric despite his lack of medical credentials — is causing alarm in the American medical and scientific community.
Experts have warned about dropping immunization rates and the return of deadly contagious diseases like the measles, which caused several deaths in 2025.
“Any changes this ACIP makes will certainly not be based in facts or evidence, but rather ideology,” said Sean O’Leary, an infectious disease and pediatric specialist who has been critical of the lack of qualifications among the committee’s new members.
Since 1991, US health officials have recommended the administration of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborn infants, as the viral liver disease exposes infected individuals to a high risk of death from cirrhosis or liver cancer.
“Ninety percent of babies infected with hepatitis B will go on to have chronic liver disease. Of those, a quarter will die from their hepatitis B infection. These are entirely preventable deaths,” O’Leary said.
But anti-vax groups and President Donald Trump alike have pushed back on the practice, with Trump insisting in September that children should not be vaccinated against hepatitis B until the age of 12, rather than soon after birth, saying: “Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. There’s no reason to give a baby that’s almost just born hepatitis B.”
