Welcome to The Logoff: A key CDC advisory committee is overhauling childhood vaccine policy for no good reason.
What happened? The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, voted on Friday to update guidance about the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been widely administered to babies at birth for decades. Now, ACIP suggests, most parents can wait until two months to vaccinate their children against hep B.
What is hep B? Hepatitis B is spread via bodily fluids and can be readily passed from parent to child; infection can lead to chronic liver disease. ACIP’s new recommendation still advises babies whose mothers either have tested positive for hep B or whose status is ambiguous to receive the vaccine at birth.
Why the change? My colleague Dylan Scott explained it best:
The committee members who wanted to make a change to hep B vaccine guidance acknowledged the limited evidence to justify their decision but argued that, because so many Americans no longer trust public health experts, they had to do something. That something amounts to a piece-by-piece dismantling of decades of scientific consensus.
What’s the context? Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged ACIP back in June, removing all 17 members and installing several anti-vaccine advocates to the new panel. This isn’t the first vaccine recommendation the committee has thrown into chaos, either; in September, ACIP changed its guidance on the Covid-19 vaccine to move away from recommending it broadly.
What’s the big picture? ACIP’s recommendation will still need approval by the CDC’s acting director, Jim O’Neill, before it takes effect, and isn’t expected to impact insurance coverage of the vaccine. But it’s bad news for evidence-based health policy and another bit of confusion added to our broken public health consensus.
