The CDC Changed Course on the Hep-B Shot. Now It Needs to Finish the Job

Former CDC Director Walensky: Keep drugmakers "free of responsibility” or they may "choose not to make vaccines"

On December 5th, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8–3 to end what may go down as one of the biggest public-health scams in American history: the universal recommendation to give every newborn in the country a hepatitis B shot.

For decades, vaccine ideologues defended this practice with a straight face. Hepatitis B is a virus spread through sex or intravenous drug use, yet we’ve been injecting babies—hours old, barely taking their first breaths—because, they insisted, a child might get it from the mother. But pregnant women are already screened, and fewer than 0.5% of U.S. pregnancies involve hepatitis-B-positive mothers. The math never added up.