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.
