The U.S. government has long recommended that all infants be vaccinated for the hepatitis B virus. The ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices), a powerful government committee, met last week and reversed that recommendation. There is no evidence backing the ACIP decision, and plenty against it. If this is carried out, it will have severe and long-term consequences for the health of babies, children and adults. And it will be a further assault on vaccines which have saved millions of lives. 

Why Is It So Important for Infants to be Vaccinated Against Hepatitis B?

Hepatitis B causes liver cancer and other dangerous liver diseases. For most people, the virus has no symptoms, which means people can spread it without knowing they have it. The policy of vaccinating infants at birth made sure that all people get this crucial vaccination before they get infected.

Before 1991 in the U.S., infants were vaccinated at birth only if their mothers showed signs of being infected. But some mothers had hepatitis B and didn’t show signs or know it, or at times the tests for the disease can give a false negative. (Very young infants and children can also catch hepatitis B from family members or others.) So that policy led to nearly 9,000 children in the U.S. getting hepatitis B each year during childbirth. (And when the disease begins in an infant, it is much more harmful than when people get it later in life, and it often lasts a lifetime.) In 1991 doctors started vaccinating all children at birth, and because of this childhood and adolescent hepatitis B infections have dramatically decreased, by 95 percent! 

Essentially what the ACIP is now recommending is a return to the pre-1991 policy that led to so many sick children. But these facts, and mountains of evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective, made no difference to the ACIP. After the ACIP voted, Trump praised the recommendation in a social media post. 

The Attack on Vaccines Comes from and Serves the Fascism Now in Power

This is one more very harmful step in the assault on vaccines and public health by the Trump regime (see here and here for earlier steps). Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chief of the Department of Health and Human Services, leads the charge. Earlier this year, as an important part of his campaign to attack vaccines (and science in general), Kennedy purged the ACIP of all 17 members—scientific experts with years of experience in vaccines. He replaced them with the current panel dominated by quacks, hacks, and campaigners against vaccines. 

These anti-vaccine lunatics have rammed through a decision that will do great harm. They dismissed extensive evidence of the vaccine’s safety and how many lives it has saved, and raised a blizzard of lies and an assault on medical science. One doctor called this out:  “The Evidence Collective (TEC) counted more than 60… falsehoods, distortions, and outright lies being megaphoned from one of the nation's highest committees.” (The Evidence Collective, a group of science and health communicators, has written a detailed account.)

The anti-vaccine frenzy is part and parcel of the conspiracy theories and anti-scientific thinking that are at the heart of the fascist movement in the U.S. As Bob Avakian sharply characterized that movement: 

These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.” (From SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, the Looming Possibility of Civil War—And the Revolution That Is Urgently Needed)

Doctors, Scientists, and Others Waged Important Resistance—but That Is Not Enough

The ACIP did not completely ban the hepatitis B vaccine but recommended cutting back its use on infants. Kennedy and others clearly wanted to go further in restricting the vaccine—they even sneaked in outside speakers for the meeting who were anti-vaccine fanatics. In part the ACIP decision did not go as far as Kennedy wanted because of a determined effort by doctors, scientists, and many others to publicize and oppose what ACIP was doing. 

One doctor wrote: “A nationwide, grassroots effort leading up to this meeting helped protect science…” This included experts in hepatitis B; medical professional organizations; two ACIP committee members who opposed the decision; and scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who have been under assault by Kennedy but who stood up for vaccine science and public health. 

Trump/MAGA Fascism Must Go Now!

It is very important that so many doctors, medical workers, public health advocates and others actively sounded the alarm about what the ACIP is doing with the hepatitis B vaccine, and defended vaccines. But the reality is that despite their great effort, and even with the overwhelming evidence and rational arguments they marshaled, the big majority of the ACIP committee voted for a policy that will harm many children, will undermine public understanding and support for vaccines, and undercut scientific medicine and scientific thinking. 

The ACIP committee was able to do this NOT because of evidence or real argument. Rational arguments and real evidence must be wielded against them, and it is very important that the case for vaccines be made before all of society. But these fascists do not listen to reason. They are able to do the damage they do because Trump/MAGA fascism holds state power. THAT is the most essential thing that we must change.

This really is a fascist regime, and it must be driven from power by mass, nonviolent struggle, as called for here by Refuse Fascism, at the earliest possible time.