Name: Doctor: No evidence hepatitis B vaccine causes harm, CDC delays vote
Uploaded: 2025-12-05T00:13:31.391Z
Duration: 4 min 48 s
Description: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed a vote until Friday on whether to change a longstanding recommendation that newborns should receive the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist, joins CBS News to discuss.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed a vote until Friday on whether to change a longstanding recommendation that newborns should receive the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist, joins CBS News to discuss.

Washington

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has delayed a vote on its longstanding recommendation that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin Hong emphasized there is no scientific evidence linking the vaccine to harm, and noted that routine vaccination has reduced annual hepatitis B cases at birth from 20,000 to about 20.

The CDC committee is also expected to review the broader childhood vaccine schedule. Dr. Chin Hong addressed concerns about vaccine ingredients and safety, stating that decades of data support the safety and necessity of current vaccination practices for infants.

Doctor: No evidence hepatitis B vaccine causes harm, CDC delays vote

The Centers for Disease Control delayed a vote on a longstanding recommendation on the hepatitis B vaccine until tomorrow. Now, currently the recommendation is that every baby must be vaccinated within 24 hours of birth, at least that first dose. To be clear, the vote would not prohibit doctors from administering the shot, but it could influence insurance coverage. Joining us live is Doctor Peter Chin Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California San Francisco. Remind our viewers why all babies are recommended that all babies are given the hepatitis B vaccine as the standard procedure right now after they're born. Well, first of all, is hepatitis B is a potentially dangerous virus. We talk about infection, but it's really what happens after infection which can lead to liver scarring, liver failure, need for transplantation and death. And the point is that the sooner you you get infected, meaning that you get infected, meaning right after birth, the higher the chances of all these complications occurring. Added to that only about one in five pregnant people get screened currently, so using screening as a way to figure out who needs a vaccine or not is potentially dangerous for that respect. And I just want to be clear because babies we know can get hepatitis B from their mothers when they're actually born when they travel through the birth canal. But they can also get it from members that have hepatitis B that may not even know they have it. Exactly people think about hepatitis B and the fact that it's not curable, but also it's very highly transmissible, so 100 times more transmissible than HIV, and that's because it can survive in bits of dried blood on toothbrushes in the environment for as long as a week. So there are concerns by members of the CDC panel that this vaccine is given to babies who often don't need it and it may be linked to severe health complications. What do you say to those concerns? I would say that I hear what people's worries are, but right now there is really no evidence that it causes harm and there's so much evidence that it causes benefit back in the early 90s before we started doing that. We had on on routine on average about 20,000 cases of hepatitis B at birth and now we're down to about 20. So that's probably the most powerful evidence that it works and more than 100 countries do vaccinate at birth because they can afford it and they have the infrastructure. So I think there's so much evidence of the benefit rather than the the potential downsize as in a safety problem or issue. Now the CDC committee is expected to also discuss the childhood vaccine schedule. Now every parent knows the first few years of life. There are a lot of doctors appointments and a lot of shots in those appointments. Why is the current schedule currently in place and is there a risk in delaying or possibly spreading out those vaccines? Well, as we already seeing some of the repercussions of lowering vaccine rates with measles with whooping cough, there's potentially things that coming down the pike like polio that we've forgotten for so long. So that's just vaccinations in general, but the schedule is really important because some diseases like whooping cough require many more vaccines. So to say that you can all lump them all into one time of the year or one age group really would not make sense from the immune system perspective because the baby's immune system is very new, so it's sluggish and it needs a little bit of more reminding for it to actually develop that antibody response. That's effective. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior has said in different interviews that he believes some of the ingredients that caused that elevated immune response can lead to other health issues like increased allergies. What do you say to those claims? I would say that the the scientific evidence doesn't show any of this. And again, this is not something that we started recently. We have decades of information around this. And again, they have all shown to be safe. And you need that adjuvant. You need that extra sauce to make the immune system more responsive, especially in a baby. Again, because I mentioned that the immune system is very sluggish when the baby's immune system is just developing. Peter Chin Hong, always great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks so much, Liz.

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