The influential center of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reconfigured Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vaccine Advisory Committee will meet Thursday and Friday (September 18 and 19) to discuss changes to childhood vaccine schedules.
Experts say these changes could make American children healthier.
Thursday’s Advisory Committee on Vaccination Practices (ACIP) meeting will focus on the hepatitis B vaccine and the MMRV vaccine. This is a version of the measles, mumps, and levella (MMR) vaccine, which protects water cells or chicken po. The first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine is currently recommended at birth, while the first dose of the MMRV vaccine is recommended for 12-15 months.
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The discussion raised by ACIP states that there is no new data to suggest that these recommendations are problematic. And he says the current schedule is well studied and is extremely effective in preventing these dangerous infections.
“It’s been a great success,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, about his recommendation to vaccinate everyone against hepatitis B at birth. Schaffner was an ACIP member in the 1980s and contacted committees of various organizations between 1986 and 2024.
Hepatitis B protects infants
Kennedy is the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit organization known for its campaign against childhood vaccines, and resigned as group president before taking on a role in HHS. In June he fired 17 ACIP sit-in members, then replaced them with new members. Part of it has become prominent for promoting unproven treatment for Covid-19 and criticizing universal vaccinations against the disease.
The two everyday childhood shots the committee votes this week are nothing new. The MMR vaccine was first approved in 1971, and the MMRV vaccine, which added chicken pox protection to the same shot, was approved in 2005. Hepatitis B vaccine has been recommended for newborns for over 30 years since 1991.
Vaccination immediately after birth prevents the infant from contracting the virus from the mother at birth. This is because the virus spreads through body fluids such as blood, saliva, menstruation, vagina, and semen, allowing babies in the birth canal.
Hepatitis B is a chronic viral infection, especially for people infected as babies. It is not easily detected, causing liver damage and can increase the risk of liver cancer. Once chronic, it is a permanent infection that requires antiviral agents and shots to manage, and can require liver transplantation. The mother is being screened for infections, but their cases are sometimes not detected, which puts the baby at risk, Higgins said.
On Tuesday (September 16), a former CDC official told KFF Health News that ACIP likely recommends pushing out the vaccine to 4-year-olds.
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“What we’re hearing tomorrow is the argument that we can identify these mothers who are positive and vaccinated, and that we can wait for other mothers until others get a little older before we can vaccinate them,” Schaffner said. “We tried it. It didn’t work.”
“Children who fall through the gap are at risk of infection and subsequent liver damage, cancer and death,” he said.
Antivaccine advocates argue that the shot does not require a shot in newborns because hepatitis B infections in adults often spread through intravenous drug use or sexual activity. However, before newborn vaccinations were introduced, there were around 18,000 cases of hepatitis B in children under the age of 10 each year, Higgins said. In about half of these cases, the cause of the infection was unknown. Children can pick up the virus by getting into contact with even smaller amounts of blood, such as frayed knees, shared toothbrushes exposed to bloody gums, or toddler biting incidents during day care.
By comparison, in 1990, CDC data showed that there were three cases of hepatitis B in every 100,000 children and adolescents in the United States. By 2002, that number had fallen to 0.3 out of 100,000. Today, it’s less than 0.1 per 100,000.
Benefits last until adulthood. As the vaccine induces long-term protection, the proportion of hepatitis B in people aged 30-39 (the first person to be vaccinated as an infant) has declined sharply since 2015.
“The downsides to this are not minimal,” Dr. Michelle Barron, senior medical director of infection prevention and management at Uchealth Hospital System in Colorado, told Live Science. “The vaccine is safe.”
MMRV vaccine
According to the current vaccination schedule, children will obtain the first dose of either MMRV or MMR along with the chicken pox vaccine between 12 and 15 months. The second dose is between the ages of 4 and 6 and usually provides lifelong immunity to infection.
Within three years of the introduction of MMRV shots, researchers noted an increased risk of seizures or fever-induced or increased risk of seizures in children who received the MMRV vaccine rather than MMR and Chicken Pox shots. According to the CDC, the risk of seizures is twice as high as MMRV in children between the ages of 1 and 2 years, leading to one febrile attack for every 2,300-2,600 MMRV administered in this age group.
Related: Measles has long-term health effects on children. Vaccines can prevent them all.
“We – and “we” mean pediatricians, vaccine experts and ACIP, and we were properly concerned about this and had very thoughtful deliberations on how the recommendations should change.” The committee determined that it would be desirable for children under four to get the MMR and chicken pox vaccine as separate shots.
However, because the risk of a febrile attack linked to the vaccine is small, the committee left the option open for parents who wanted their children to choose one needle to choose MMRV after being informed of the risk and benefits.
Generally, between 2% and 5% of children under the age of 5 may experience seizures in response to fever (caused by either infection or vaccination). Children with a history of febrile attacks are slightly more likely to develop epilepsy later in life, but in almost all cases, fever-induced attacks do not cause damage and disappear as the child ages.
If ACIP limits patients’ options to get the MMRV vaccine, clinics using shots are likely to see supply issues, Higgins told Live Science.
Both the MMRV and MMR vaccines prevent measles and can cause drugs, brain swelling, immune memory loss, and progressive and fatal neurological disorders, sometimes called subacute sclerotic panan encephalitis (SSPE). It also prevents mumps, a viral infection that can cause hearing and infertility in men. And in pregnant women, rubella, a viral infection that causes fever and rash, can lead to abnormal heart and brain development in the fetus.
Chicken Pox vaccines not only prevent painful and itchy viral infections, but also reduce the risk of children getting shingles. This is a ferocious rash caused by the same virus that the chicken po reacts in the nervous system after the initial infection has passed.
Causing controversy
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2017 policy statement summarizes safety data on the Hepatitis B vaccine in Vaccine Safety Data Link, a massive vaccine safety monitoring project launched in 1990. These data show that “receiving hepatitis B vaccine disease and death of neonatal prolapse or atumatous of laumatoids, no causal linkage between car symptoms: disease, hemolytic anemia in children, anaphylaxis, optic neuritis, Guillanbale syndrome, sudden developmental sensory hearing loss, or other chronic diseases.”
There are no indications of new data that will change this conclusion. But lifting it at the ACIP meeting could feed a lack of trust in vaccinations, Baron said.
“All of these are external noises that cause skepticism and generally cause alarms around the vaccine,” Baron said. “This multifaceted attack on vaccines that have been around for 30-40 years has been used safely and effectively during that time, without new research and without new data.
Meetings could also be an opportunity to spread fears about the timing of childhood vaccine schedules, generally. This is a frequent attack point by anti-vaxin supporters. Activists have argued that schedule safety is not studied, but that is not true.
“Each stage is being studied to see if new vaccines added to the schedule will cause notable negative effects,” Schaffner said. “That’s before the recommendation is made.”
After adding new vaccines to the schedule, there are multiple safety reporting systems to monitor side effects that are not caught up in the trial, such as the increased risk of fever attacks in young children with MMRV vaccines. These systems allow long-term research to look for serious consequences over time across the population, Higgins said. “We don’t see any reliable connections there.”
American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a private insurance company trade group, announced in a statement on September 16th that the insurance company will continue to cover the vaccines it recommended as of September 1, 2026.
The program specifically serves uninsured and uninsured children. A child who is on or qualified for Medicaid. American Indian or Alaskan Native children qualified under the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.
“I love that health insurance companies come out and say, ‘I think the vaccines are important, we’ll cover them,'” Higgins said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical advice.
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