CDC advisory panel delays vote on hepatitis B vaccines after unruly meeting
In a chaotic meeting Thursday rife with misinformation, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel — whose members Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired in June and replaced with a group that has largely expressed skepticism of vaccines — once again delayed an expected vote on hepatitis B vaccines .
Because of disagreements and confusion over the voting language, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's panel, formally known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, decided to push the vote to Friday morning instead of holding it Thursday afternoon as scheduled. The committee had previously tabled a September vote on the hepatitis B vaccine schedule.
The meeting was, in numerous ways, a radical departure from past practices. Typically, the ACIP evaluates new vaccines or new indications for them, not shots that have been administered in the same way for decades.
The CDC has for 34 years recommended that all newborns get a first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. But the panel is considering whether to roll back that guidance and instead suggest that women who test negative for hepatitis B decide in consultation with a health care provider whether their baby should get the dose at birth.
If adopted, that recommendation would go against widespread consensus among public health experts, who before the meeting issued loud pleas not to change the hepatitis B vaccination schedule.
On Thursday, the advisory panel convened in the CDC’s broadcast studio, under bright lights and in front of large television cameras, instead of its typical conference room — giving the appearance of a televised show rather than a scientific discussion. When asked about the venue, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said it was meant to “accommodate increased public interest in the committee.”
The proceedings featured a barrage of misleading claims and cherry-picked data.
Several presenters and panel members claimed there was limited evidence of the hepatitis B vaccine’s safety or efficacy, ignoring decades of evidence to the contrary. At past meetings, the CDC’s medical experts have presented data on the risks of a given disease and the safety and efficacy of vaccines that target it. But the presentations Thursday were instead given by two anti-vaccine activists and a climate scientist who has written for an anti-vaccine publication.
The meeting was the most blatant example to date of how far the panel has strayed from its original mission to consider who should get vaccines — and when — based on a complete scientific analysis of the risks and benefits.
In a presentation on safety, anti-vaccine activist Mark Blaxill — a businessman and author with no medical credentials who was recently hired at the CDC — suggested that symptoms identified in babies who got the hepatitis B vaccine, such as fatigue, weakness, diarrhea or irritability were “possibly connected” to swelling of the brain, or encephalitis.
Dr. Cody Meissner, the only ACIP member who has previously served on the committee, pushed back: “That is absolutely not encephalitis,” he said. “That’s not a statement that a physician would make. They are not related to encephalitis, and you can’t say that.”
By early afternoon, multiple members of the committee expressed confusion over what they were voting on and pointed to issues with the voting language.
“Perhaps this was written by the department of redundancy department,” quipped ACIP member Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist.
The panel’s chair, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, was not present for the decision to postpone the hepatitis B vote. Vice chair Dr. Robert Malone said Milhoan was “about to jump on a plane to go to Asia and would not be available, I believe, for [the discussion] tomorrow.”
