Could you hear me screaming at the radio on the way to pick up my friend from the airport when I heard the vaccine shenanigans.
I write, of course, of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) who voted today to recommend NOT giving newborn babies a hepatitis B vaccine. Routine hep B immunization for newborns has been on the vaccination schedule for THIRTY years.
Instead they recommend that only babies born to women who test positive for hep B get the vaccination. But what about the women who are so newly infected with hep B that it doesn’t show up on a blood test, a la HIV. What about their babies?
This is not the final vote, this is just a recommendation.
This recommended change was strongly objected to by the actual medical experts in the room, many of whom were not allowed to speak or give evidence. The medical community points out that this 30 year recommendation has VASTLY decreased hep B rates in children. Hepatitis B can lead to chronic liver problems, liver cancer, and even premature death.
The council sounded very paternalistic when saying that parents need to carefully consider whether to vaccinate their newly born child. To me this puts the blame on whatever happens to the infant squarely on the parents. And the verbal poison the parents are being exposed to on social media via “mommy groups”.
How did we get here?
Oh, so many reasons. MAHA, the influencers who want to see the world burn, those who want to control women and babies.
It is a tale as old as time. Control the babies, control the women. But at the black heart of it is control the women because, they, as CIS men, know best. But the 6 men and women on the committee that voted for this monstrosity of a recommendation will be dead when the first babies, who will be born shortly, starts showing the liver damage.
There was a paper written on the “Economic evaluation of delaying the infant hepatitis B vaccination schedule”. The paper was written by Eric W. Hall, Prabhu Gounder, Heather Bradly, and Noele P. Nelson and published in medRxiv on November 25, 2025. Citation at the end of the post.
Each of the delayed vaccination scenarios were modeled on a Markov model to simulate lifetime health outcomes for babies who have the vaccine, those who have a delayed vaccine, and those who have no vaccine, among others. The costs of the attendant liver problems skyrocketed, as did the infections and possible/probably early death.
The conclusion of this paper is that even brief delays in hep B vaccine initiation exacts a wide cost to the person (baby) being vaccinated. The cost cited is hep B infections, chronic liver problems, including cirrhosis, and cancer, decrease in life years (meaning the possibility of early death), and the list goes on. This points a number to what will happen if the hep B vaccination schedule is disrupted.
I found this brief paper very stark and it tells a devastating tale of possible disease and possible death for babies that aren’t vaccinated at birth.
My personal feelings on this are the same as when RFK Jr. came in and cleaned house. This means he fired all the responsible medical type people who were previously on ACIP. It is like when you let the fox in the henhouse and they fire all the roosters who protect the hens and the fox hires other foxes to protect the hens, why are we surprised when the hens all end up dead?
This will end badly and all the culprits will be dead by the time the damage is assessed.
Hall, E. W., Gounder, P., Bradley, H., Nelson, N. P., Hall, E. W., Gounder, P., Bradley, H., & Nelson, N. P. (2025). Economic evaluation of delaying the infant hepatitis B vaccination schedule. bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 