Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician and Republican health care leader in Congress, on Wednesday offered his harshest criticism yet of the Health and Human Services Department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel considers the childhood vaccine schedule.
The agency’s vaccine advisory committee on Thursday plans to revisit the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, potentially recommending children receive the shot when they’re older.
When asked on Wednesday why the panel would target that shot, Cassidy said of Kennedy’s HHS: “The best I can tell is that they have a prejudice against science. That’s the best I can tell.”
Cassidy, R-La., was the lone GOP Senate physician to take such a strong stance against reconsidering the hepatitis birth dose — others were more sympathetic to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
President Donald Trump and his administration officials have called for the hepatitis birth dose to be administered later in a child’s development, as part of Kennedy’s push to remake U.S. vaccine policy.
Cassidy has long defended the use of the hepatitis B vaccine, saying it is both effective at preventing disease and safe for infants. Detractors of the birth dose argue that it’s unnecessary for a newborn because birth mothers are tested for hepatitis B during pregnancy. But many physicians say an infant could contract the virus from a family member or other close contact.
Since the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose recommendation went into effect in 1991, the U.S. has gone from an average of 20,000 hepatitis B transmissions at birth or shortly after, to 20 per year.
“If you reverse that, we’re going to start working our way back up to 20,000,” Cassidy said.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill disagree.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who’s also a physician, said while he’s “grateful for the vaccine,” he harbors concerns about giving it to 1-day-old babies and worries it could impact their immune systems negatively. He said doctors and families should really discuss the pros and cons of the shot prior to administering it.
“I think that the CDC recommendations are taken as gospel, and it really pigeonholes the doctor and the family,” Marshall said of the current vaccine recommendation.
Another Senate physician, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was more opposed and said, “I think there’s no medical reason to give or mandate a hepatitis B vaccine for a newborn.”
When reminded that the CDC provides a recommendation not a mandate, Paul replied, “I’m not here to debate you.”
The advisory meeting comes at a tense time at the CDC. Kennedy earlier this year fired former director Susan Monarez for allegedly refusing to rubber stamp the vaccine advisory’s recommendations. That was after Kennedy fired all 17 members of the committee and replaced them with handpicked choices, including vaccine skeptics and others with less experience in public health.
During a Senate hearing in September, Monarez told senators that she and CDC scientists were being pressured by Kennedy to remove the hepatitis B birth dose vaccine recommendation and that Kennedy’s political advisers repeatedly ignored data demonstrating the benefits of the vaccine.
A recent study from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that reviewed over 400 scientific studies and reports on the hepatitis B vaccine found there is no scientific basis for delaying the birth dose, and that giving newborns the birth dose has cut hepatitis B infections by more than 99 percent since 1991. The study also found that the shot prevents future instances of chronic liver disease, cancer and death across the entire U.S. population.
“Delaying the first dose would reduce protection for infants and increase the risk of avoidable HBV infections, undermining decades of progress in hepatitis B prevention and U.S. efforts to eliminate viral hepatitis as a public health threat,” the research center wrote in prepared comments for the Thursday meeting.
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