Many health care providers—including doctors, medical societies, city and state health departments, and regional health alliances—are rejecting unscientific vaccine recommendations from an influential federal advisory panel, and instead will continue following guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

The panel, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), voted Friday to overturn a 34-year-old recommendation to vaccinate all babies against hepatitis B at birth, a practice that has helped reduce the number of hepatitis B infections in children and young people by 99%. Instead, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to recommend the birth dose only for the infants of women who test positive for hepatitis B or whose infection status is unknown.

The panel voted that women whose blood tests show they aren't infected with hepatitis B should discuss the issue with their doctors. The acting CDC director, Jim O'Neill, MA, has not yet announced whether the agency will adopt the recommendations as official policy.

Hospitals, regional health alliances rejecting ACIP recommendations

Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago will continue to recommend hepatitis B vaccines to newborns within 24 hours of delivery – when immunization will protect the largest proportion of infants – as recommended by the Chicago and Illinois health departments, said Larry K. Kociolek, MD, MSCI, vice president of system preparedness, prevention, and response and a pediatric infectious diseases attending physician.

"The pediatric vaccine schedule currently adopted in the US is based on decades of research, extensive real-world experience, and vetting by well-trained and unbiased medical and public health experts," Kociolek told CIDRAP News.

Recommendations from the ACIP "were made without any new research suggesting that the current vaccine schedule is flawed in terms of its safety or effectiveness," Kociolek said. "We will continue to endorse the pediatric vaccine schedule currently in place."

ACIP's members were handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist. Many of the new members parrot Kennedy's false claims that vaccines aren't adequately tested for safety.