FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary suggested that the agency will revisit whether infants should receive the Hepatitis B vaccine.
“If a woman was having a baby today in New York City and the doctor is about to give her the Hep B vaccine, what would you advise that mother?” Martha MacCallum of Fox News asked Makary.
“I personally don’t believe that the evidence is solid to say the Hep B shot needs to be given at birth,” the FDA commissioner said. “It’s a sexually transmitted infection you’re trying to prevent. Kids are not sexually active until they’re of sexual age. So, a lot of parents say we’re going to wait until they’re 10, or 11, or 12.”
“If the mom’s Hep B positive, that’s different,” he noted, adding that “these are nuanced issues.”
“We believe in vaccines, but does that mean people need the anthrax vaccine? Of course not, it was a disaster and taken off the market. One of the rotaviruses was a disaster and taken off the market,” Makary added. “We’ve got tried and true vaccines and we’ve got vaccines like the Covid booster in young healthy people that we can ask questions about.”
An advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pledged to reassess childhood vaccine schedules.
“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed nations receive and what most of us in this room received when we were children,” the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)’s co-chair, Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., said during a meeting. “In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” he explained. “This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amount of vaccine ingredients, and relative timing of different vaccines.”
