Shining a light on hepatitis B

Sex, drugs, and babies?

Highlights

• The hepatitis B vaccine is given to newborn babies in America’s hospitals within moments of birth. Do newborns really need a shot for an illness associated with highly risky sexual activity like prostitution and illegal drug use with contaminated needles?
• To study hepatitis and develop a vaccine, institutionalized children from the 1950s into the 1970s were sickened with “fever, vomiting, diarrhea, enlargement of the liver, jaundice and hepatitis.”
• Some hepatitis B vaccines were monitored for safety for only four to seven days before being licensed for use.
• Waning effectiveness has been an issue for the hepatitis B vaccine since it was created, and experts still aren’t sure how long protection lasts.
• The hepatitis B vaccine has been associated with multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, optic neuritis, lupus, alopecia, vasculitis, and thrombocytopenia.

Introduction

Welcome to the world, little one. Let’s get you rocking and rolling on the medical path with this shot to stop sex and drugs from ruining your party. Under the bright lights of the maternity ward, we’ll shoot you up with this hepatitis B vaccine. After all, who knows what your mom was up to — she might not know she has it!

That sounds totally insane, doesn’t it? But this is how we are treating babies and mothers in American hospitals. The hepatitis B vaccine was developed to address illness associated with highly risky sexual activity like prostitution and illegal drug use with contaminated needles. Why would we give babies a shot like this? And can the claimed protection last into their young adulthood when some people start making risky choices?

Learning about the hepatitis B vaccine is an eye-opener that many credit as their wake-up call about childhood vaccines, the moment they finally asked, “Why are we doing this? Is there a better way?”

Read on to come to your own conclusion about whether the hepatitis B vaccine is the right birthday present for our precious children.

What is hepatitis B?

Hepatitis translates to “suffering of the liver.” Our livers are necessary for our survival. The liver filters toxins from our blood, assists digestion, modulates fat storage, and helps the body process carbohydrates.¹ When the liver is not functioning properly, the whole person suffers and, in severe cases, can die. The word comes from the Greek root “hepar” meaning liver, and “itis” indicates inflammation.² There are five main types of medically recognized viral hepatitis, labeled A, B, C, D, and E.³

But liver inflammation, hepatitis, can have many causes: a virus, bacteria, alcohol consumption, pharmaceutical drug side effects, toxins, genetics, and autoimmune disorders. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is the medical cause behind most toxic hepatitis in North America and has been detected in suicide attempts.⁴ The popular website Healthline.com states, “Liver injury is the most common complication that leads to drugs failing to receive FDA approval or being removed from the marketplace. … Drug-induced liver injury is the most common cause of liver failure in the United States and Europe.”⁵

“Hepatitis B — serum hepatitis as it was known before the virus that caused it had been identified — showed a most unusual epidemiology. It was a virus that could cause a lot of harm, or none, depending upon the patient’s age at infection, the mode and the dose or “inoculum,” and traits of the individual infected. Sometimes the virus caused an acute illness, then passed out of the body. Other times it caused only mild illness but provoked a chronic liver infection that could result in cirrhosis, cancer, and death. Hepatitis B was common in populations that came in intimate contact with blood products: drug addicts, hemophiliacs, people who have anal sex, and the babies of hepatitis B-infected mothers. It was, as we have seen, also common in soldiers injected or infused with contaminated vaccines or blood products. In places like military barracks, prisons, and mental asylums where hundreds of people might come into contact with the virus through sex or by deposits on toothbrushes, on bath towels and in hard coughs, it was a frequent visitor. … A tiny amount of the virus could cause infection, although there was little documented transmission other than via blood and sex. In 30 percent of all cases, however, the source of infection was unknown.” –Allan Arthur, Vaccine, page 308.

Because hepatitis B shows up in so many ways (or seems to lie dormant) doctors have a difficult time diagnosing it.⁶

Was the vaccine necessary?

Given the difficulty of diagnosing hepatitis B, how do we know how many people have it? Regardless, researchers guess at statistics, “Globally, 296 million people are estimated to be chronic carriers of hepatitis B virus (HBV), with approximately 820,000 deaths per year for complications mainly due to HBV-related cirrhosis and hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC).”⁷

As we have seen with other vaccines that target viruses (like HPV, or “meningitis,”) the vaccine covers only a fraction of what a person might encounter. This means a person can get the shot and still get sick. There are vaccines only for the viruses believed to cause hepatitis A and B, and scientists believe people can only get hepatitis D if they already have hepatitis B. The vaccine against B is thought to prevent D as well.⁸ There are no vaccines for the bacterial, toxin-related, or other causes of hepatitis.

Regardless, the public health line is: “The only way that we know to prevent it is to have widespread vaccination.” Dr. Harold Margolis, Director of Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control.⁹ But is this true? If we know the typical mode of transmission is sexual contact and needle use, it seems there may be ways other than a vaccine to prevent its spread. For example, mothers can be screened for it.

Vaccine development history

Hepatitis was a huge problem among the military during World War II, because of medical interventions like transfusions, surgery, infected needles, and vaccines.¹⁰ In fact, one of the most deadly outbreaks of hepatitis B came from a mandatory military vaccine in the 1940s. In 1942, the military “accidentally infected 300,000 men with hepatitis B, killing more than 100 of them with a contaminated yellow fever vaccine.”¹¹ Not surprisingly, the news of this epidemic was suppressed because of national security concerns and to avoid affecting military morale.¹² The vaccine was contaminated because researchers at Rockefeller Institute decided to use human serum (a blood product) to make the shot, recklessly ignoring warnings and safety concerns in favor of fast production under pressure from the U.S. government. The avoidable, tragic scandal was recently described in the American Journal of Public Health in 2021 with the provocative title, “The 1942 Massive Contamination of Yellow Fever Vaccine: A Public Health Consequence of Scientific Arrogance.” Lead scientist Wilbur Sawyer reasoned that he was “cooking the serum at 56 degrees [centigrade] for up to an hour, long enough to kill any known virus at the time.”¹³ Because of this reassurance of “sterilization,” the scientist collecting blood from “healthy white adults” at Johns Hopkins University didn’t bother to ask donors if they’d ever had hepatitis, nor was the blood screened for it. This quick and dirty science was not uncommon, and the U.S. saw further tragedy from contaminated polio vaccines.)

One of the world’s top virologists, Dr. Tom Rivers was a government employee when the soldiers fell ill and died from the contaminated yellow fever vaccine. He said, “That experience had a profound effect on me, and since then I have always balked at anyone’s taking a chance on having human serum or human tissues in a … vaccine, period.”¹⁴ However, there were plenty of researchers who did not share his conservative approach to safety. The initial hepatitis B vaccines were made with human blood products.

One of the earliest scientists to study hepatitis B and potential treatments or vaccines was Saul Krugman. He joined the now infamous Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York in the 1950s.¹⁵ The institution was home to 4,000-6,000 disabled or mentally handicapped children. The overcrowded facility was known to be filthy, and children were suffering from hepatitis. Krugman was enlisted to address the illnesses and ended up performing experiments on the children well into the 1970s. To study hepatitis and develop a vaccine, Krugman and his team injected the children with gamma globulin (proteins from blood that make antibodies), and “fed them virus-containing material made from the stool of six patients with hepatitis and jaundice that had been so refined that Krugman’s team deemed the end product ‘safe to feed.’”¹⁶ In the name of science, the children were sickened, and developed “fever, vomiting, diarrhea, enlargement of the liver, jaundice and hepatitis.” Researchers claimed they had permission from the children’s parents.

For context, these children were also subject to research on rubella, pertussis, and tuberculosis.

Although the world was reeling from the horrific atrocities of World War II which led to the adoption of the Nuremburg Code against medical experimentation, it was accepted standard practice in the U.S. to do medical experiments on vulnerable and captive populations.¹⁷ Krugman’s research was not only undisturbed, it was encouraged by governments and medical professionals. “In fact, a formidable list of sponsors and supporters including the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, NYU’s School of Medicine, the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, and the Journal of the American Medical Association had bought into it. All knew about the research program; not one had a problem with it.”¹⁸

The famous Dr. Rivers was one of the few who questioned the ethics of medical experimentation, and recalled the time in an oral history: “[T]here was no settled code or standard to which one could refer regarding such experiments. To be sure, a number of statements on human experimentation had been made at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Unfortunately, however, these statements were not clearcut and in some instances were even contradictory. I will say this, that in the end the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board voted to continue with the whole blood and plasma experiments in spite of their hazardous nature, because at the time thousands of people were dying annually of infectious hepatitis following blood transfusions and the injection of plasma.”¹⁹

“[A]llegations arose in 1964, claiming that the parents of Willowbrook students had been coerced into signing their sons and daughters over to the researchers. Due to intense overcrowding at the institution, new admissions had been curtailed — unless, of course, parents were willing to have their child become a test subject in Krugman’s Willowbrook research unit, where spots were still available.”²⁰ This was at a time when pregnant women across the country were living in fear of rubella and being told to abort their babies or risk giving birth to a disabled child who would end up in such an institution.

Krugman ended his research in the 1970s, having discovered a difference between hepatitis A and B, and developed a vaccine for the latter. “Krugman had created a crude hepatitis B vaccine out of boiled serum from former hepatitis patients in 1971 and used it to protect some of the inmates at Willowbrook.” He joined the American Academy of Pediatrics as president in 1972.

After Krugman’s work, The first commercially available hepatitis B vaccines were developed in the U.S. and France.²¹ They were made using blood from people infected with hepatitis B. Surface antigens (markers on the outside of the virus) were taken from the blood and “inactivated and purified” by using urea, pepsin, formaldehyde, and heat. Remember, when viruses are used in vaccines, they need to be altered into a form that is not going to make people sick. Scientists do this by “killing” or “inactivating” the virus by drenching it in formaldehyde (the same chemical used for embalming), applying high heat (which makes viruses fall apart), and using enzymes to break it up.

According to a 2022 publication, “these first-generation vaccines have been administered to several million individuals with an excellent record of safety and effectiveness.”²² But many people disagreed the shot was safe. The authors had to admit there was a “belief” that the vaccine “could be contaminated with other blood-borne viruses such as HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).” The authors insisted these fears were “unfounded.”   

The authors claim the first-generation vaccine was phased out because of those “unfounded” fears and eventually replaced in 1986 with the world’s first genetically engineered vaccines.²³ One gene called the “S gene” was isolated from HBV and inserted by genetic engineering into the yeast. The yeast was then fermented, creating large quantities of the HBV antigen. These were the second-generation vaccines.

A third and fourth generation were created during the 1990’s, where the antigen was attached to aluminum to create a greater immune response. The body reacts to the toxic aluminum and since the hepatitis B stand-in is attached to it, the body then also identifies that as something bad which needs an immune response.

What’s on the market today?

There are four licensed hepatitis vaccines on the market as of September 2024.

One of the hepatitis B vaccines licensed by the FDA in 1989, Engerix-B was monitored for only four days. The package insert notes that after the vaccine was licensed, “delayed onset” adverse events were reported weeks after administration of the shot.

Participants in the clinical trial for Recombivax were monitored for five days. Researchers acknowledge a “delayed onset” reaction could happen weeks later, based on postmarket observations.²⁴ Recombivax was first licensed in 1986.

Local and systemic adverse reactions of participants in the clinical trial for Prehevbrio were monitored for seven days, and researchers collected serious adverse event data for six months. The vaccine was licensed in 2021.

In contrast, researchers testing Heplisav collected local and systemic reactions for seven days and monitored serious adverse events for 12 months. The vaccine was licensed in 2017.

Does the vaccine work?

First, let’s take a moment to think about what it means to say that “vaccines work.” What is the point of vaccines? Generally, it’s to stop people from getting ill. Well, before COVID it was, but now we hear vaccines cause illness that they can’t stop, but the resulting illness will be less severe. Overall, those who favor vaccinations want illness to go away. Those who say “vaccines work” generally tend to look around and say, “Hey, we don’t see polio anymore. We don’t see smallpox. I don’t even know what rubella is, so vaccines work!” In other words, people associate the introduction of vaccines with the perceived disappearance of specific illnesses.  But the fact that many illnesses were already in rapid decline before the introduction of vaccines gets glossed over or dismissed.²⁵ And the idea that “polio” has been redefined and renamed over decades isn’t well known.

Though sometimes researchers may give a hat tip to the many reasons illnesses disappear from society, they always must kiss the ring of the pharmaceutical giant by ensuring everyone it was really the vaccines that kicked the bad illness out of the kingdom. For example, the 2022 “Historical Overview” of hepatitis B vaccinations observed eight different ways hepatitis B was on its way out, but reassured us –  almost as an afterthought – that the vaccine was of the “utmost importance” in reducing its burden.

The hepatitis B vaccine does result in “breakthrough infections,” meaning infection even after vaccination. “Breakthrough infections” is a term that popped up during COVID times and used to be known as “vaccine failure,” but this new term encompasses many ways a vaccine can fail.

The CDC and the Infectious Disease Society of America tell us vaccines can fail because there isn’t enough immune response (primary), the vaccine can work initially but wane and stop (secondary), or new variants pop up after the vaccine is introduced (strain replacement). This graphic below was made to explain COVID vaccine failures, but the terms apply to all shots or other “immunizing agents.”

Primary vaccine failure is an issue for the hepatitis B vaccine. The Hepatitis B Foundation estimates up to 15% of recipients fail to respond to the shot (and the solution is more shots).²⁶

And as we touched on in the HPV Part 1 article, the way researchers say vaccines work in a lab — their efficacy — has nothing to do with how they perform in the real world — their effectiveness. “Along with factors related to the host (i.e. age, gender, immunocompetence, genetics, co-infections), factors related to the vaccine and vaccination have also been found to affect the response to vaccination. Among these, dosage and schedule of vaccination, site of injection, and route of administration are key factors for achieving an optimal immune response.”²⁷

How long does it last? And what is secondary vaccine failure?

Secondary vaccine failure — waning over time — has been an issue for the hepatitis B vaccine since it was created, and experts still aren’t sure how long protection lasts. In 2022, researchers wrote, “Whether a primary course of vaccination without the administration of booster(s) can confer life-long immunity is not known.”²⁸

Secondary to whether a vaccine “works” to stop someone from getting sick with the target illness, is how long that induced antibody response will last.  How long the hepatitis B vaccine lasts “is still an issue under debate,” according to a 2022 publication in “Viruses.”²⁹ The authors state, “Questions in need of a definitive answer include: how long is post-vaccination immunity expected to last? Is the immunity depending on the persistence of anti-HBs antibodies at protective concentrations…? Is booster vaccination necessary to sustain immunity?”

Let’s reflect on the fact that this shot has been used for decades. It was added to the CDC immunization schedule for infants in 1991. Is it shocking that we are giving babies this shot with the intent it will protect them when they reach adolescence or adulthood, but after over 20 years of giving the shot it’s still unknown how long the protection lasts? “The success of universal infant vaccination relies on the fact that the vaccine-induced immunity can last during adolescence and adulthood, when the risk of exposure to HBV increases significantly.”³⁰

The CDC recently decided to recommend “universal” hepatitis B vaccines for adults. This is because HHS declared that we should eliminate viral hepatitis as a health threat by 2030.³¹ Everyone, regardless of risk, should get this vaccine, according to the CDC. Before 2022, it was recommended only for high-risk adults. But using the same playbook where universal shots were recommended for infants because high-risk adults were not coming in for the three-dose series, the CDC reasons that recommending it for all people — including those not at risk — would cast a net to catch the risky fish. The slide below is from a 2021 ACIP presentation about recommending the shot, summarizing how effective it is to make a shot universal, regardless of individual risk assessment.³²

The CDC is banking on people doing what they’re told and blindly trusting them along with the doctors who administer this shot. Do they have your best interest in mind or are they pushing a policy? The only limitation the CDC sees with this approach is that they’re not sure how much it will increase vaccine uptake. But they know it will increase! One of the advantages to a universal approach rather than a risk-based recommendation is less conversation between patients and their doctors. It’s easier for the provider to simply say, “It’s time for your shots!” than to have to talk about risk factors to their patients. This shouts loud and clear what the CDC has to say about informed consent: less conversation = more vaccination!(This has been a strategy for decades — check out the section “What is informed consent” in “Shining a light on meningitis” to dive deeper.)

Safety concerns

“Some scientists believe that in certain people, the vaccine can be worse than the disease,” according to ABC’s “Who’s calling the shots?” report on their program  “20/20,” in January 1999.”³³

Cases of Guillain Barre syndrome (GBS)³⁴ and multiple sclerosis (MS) have been reported after hepatitis B vaccination.³⁵ One study in 2005 found that “adults who received a hepatitis B vaccine were five times more likely than the control group to develop [MS].”³⁶ That same study found a significantly increased risk for rheumatoid arthritis, optic neuritis, lupus, alopecia, vasculitis, and thrombocytopenia.” In France, “cases of [MS] rose by 65% in the years following an aggressive national campaign to increase hepatitis B vaccination rates.”³⁷ Another 2004 study found the risk of MS tripled after the vaccine.³⁸ But both the French government and the World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety who push the shot decided there was “insufficient evidence” that the shots caused MS.³⁹

Papers have been published showing an increased incidence of diabetes after hepatitis B vaccination,⁴⁰ as well as thrombocytopenia.⁴¹

Analysis of Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports in the 1990s showed the “striking finding” that reported injuries (77%) were largely among females. Only 23% were reported in males.⁴²

Hepatitis B vaccine was one of the routine vaccines that included thimerosal, a mercury additive, along with DTP and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) until it was prohibited in 1999.⁴³ “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies” contains summaries of many peer-reviewed publications that evidence the dangers of mercury in vaccines. Specifically, boys who received the hepatitis B vaccines with mercury were nine times more likely than unvaccinated children to be developmentally disabled and three times more likely to develop autism.⁴⁴ Newborn monkeys in a research study who got the shot had “significant delays in neonatal reflexes and neurological development.”⁴⁵

The hepatitis B vaccine contains aluminum, which has been linked to a large number of illnesses and chronic conditions including fatigue, pain, cognitive disorders, memory and sleep problems, autism spectrum disorders, autoimmune and neurological damage, nervous system disorders, muscle weakness, and more.⁴⁶

The hepatitis B vaccine has been linked to MS and other autoimmune diseases. One study found the vaccine tripled the risk of MS.⁴⁷ Another study found the vaccine significantly increased the risk of developing type 1 diabetes.⁴⁸ The vaccine has also been linked to an increased risk of internal bleeding⁴⁹ and childhood leukemia.⁵⁰

The Institute of Medicine issued a report on causal relationships between vaccines and injuries which featured “rare allergic reactions to hepatitis B” among other things.⁵¹

Medical historian Arthur Allan, author of “Vaccine, The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver,” observed, “Although it is difficult to pin down the origins of the global epidemics of hepatitis B and C, the sharing of blood products through therapeutic interventions, including vaccination, was a major factor.”⁵²

Congress weighs in on the hepatitis B vaccine

One very important function of our Congress is to have oversight of presidential activities and agencies. Holding public hearings and creating a record of primary source witnesses and documents is a critical role in our constitutional republic. In the late 1990s, some members of Congress became concerned about the number of vaccine-related injuries and deaths and decided it was time to “exercise[] our oversight responsibility for the Department of Health and Human Services … to ensure that our national immunization policies and programs are functioning properly.”⁵³ The Committee on Government Reform in the House of Representatives, headed by Dan Burton from Indiana and ranking member Henry Waxman from California, held a hearing called “Hepatitis B Vaccine: Helping or Hurting Public Health?” Could you imagine a hearing like this being held today for any vaccine or “immunizing agent”?

Burton noted a reason for the hearing in his opening statement: reports of more injuries and deaths from the vaccine than from the illness itself.

He asked: “Is it possible that the preventative measure for the disease is riskier than the disease itself? We must ask ourselves that question.” The intent behind the hearing was to look at the policy the federal government had of recommending the shot for infants and taking away liability from manufacturers. The lawmakers were not there to debate the science itself, but instead they “created a forum for asking questions about what scientific evidence does exist and whether further studies should be completed.”

Witness H.R. Shepherd from the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute (Sabin, of polio vaccine fame) tried to assure the committee that the shot was safe and necessary, but also felt moved to address “desperate” parents who blamed the hepatitis B vaccine for their baby’s sudden death. He dismissed their lived experience by linking them with “activists” who raised “unfounded fears” about the shot by “engag[ing] with families with children who suffer from serious maladies by persuading them of a false connection between the maladies and the hepatitis B vaccine.” He also admitted it was true that babies are not very likely to get hepatitis B, but insisted “universal vaccination” would “protect all of today’s children.”

One of those “activists” and “desperate” parents was also a witness, Michael Belkin, who testified to the death of his 5-week-old daughter after her second hepatitis B shot. Her death was labeled SIDS despite an autopsy note of brain swelling. He urged the lawmakers to rethink vaccine policy and investigate “conflict between the public interest and the private interest of drug companies and the interest of the bureaucracy that is violating the public interest.” He quoted CDC and ACIP statements that babies are not at risk, but “efforts to vaccinate persons in the major risk groups have had limited success.” So the federal solution was to “get ‘em while they had ‘em.” “In the long term, universal infant vaccination would eliminate the need for vaccinating adolescents and high-risk adults.”

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, the CDC’s recommendations for vaccines are about policy, not the medical needs of your child. This hearing is a prime example. The federal government recommends hepatitis B within hours of birth not because it’s right for your baby, but because they have a policy of wanting to target specific individuals they couldn’t get to come into a medical office. Instead, they targeted groups who felt they had no choice — mothers with newborns in a hospital setting, military recruits, and young adults entering college.

Over a decade after that congressional hearing questioned the necessity of “universal” hepatitis B shots, a 2011 peer-reviewed published paper titled “Do we really need Hepatitis B on the Second Day of Life? Vaccination Mandates and Shifting Representations of Hepatitis B” highlighted the policy dance with the shot.⁵⁴

Why is the hepatitis B vaccine given to babies?

As you’ve read, hepatitis B is a virus associated with risky behaviors involving sexual activity or drug use. Mothers can easily be screened for it, if necessary, before giving birth. Why in the world would a vaccine aimed at preventing illness from high-risk behaviors be given to an infant within moments of coming out of the womb?

Babies get hepatitis B vaccines because adults who engage in risky behaviors were hard to vaccinate. Babies in a hospital, however, are a captive audience.

Further, the CDC explains: We can’t trust mothers to know whether they’re infected, so we just need to target babies.

The CDC doesn’t tell mothers that they can easily order a hepatitis B screening test, with same day results, for as little as $24 or simply ask a hospital to do one if they (or someone close to them) may have been exposed.⁵⁵

What do you think should be a public health priority to stop the spread of hepatitis B: telling parents they must give a chemical cocktail with known risks to their newborn infant moments after birth, or telling moms they can take a simple blood test to find out if the shot is necessary for their child? Before you wonder about that child’s risk of exposure in years to come, let’s note that the CDC didn’t list that as a concern. They scared mothers into thinking they can unknowingly harm their babies.

Initially, the CDC targeted high-risk groups including intravenous drug users, prostitutes, men who have sex with men, and babies born to women who tested positive. Not surprisingly, these groups were hard to reach. Further, there wasn’t federal money for vaccinating these groups. In 1991, the CDC decided to recommend hepatitis B for infants, and the money suddenly appeared in 1992.

Many wondered why the CDC didn’t recommend the shot for teenagers instead of infants. For this new vaccine, it wasn’t known how long immunity would last. “[W]ould immunity last into adulthood when people started engaging in the behaviors that put them most at risk?”⁵⁶

The answer is, teens aren’t as likely to come in for vaccines as babies are. “To simplify the introduction of hepatitis B vaccination into the existing programs of immunization targeted to infants and children,” researchers developed combination shots.⁵⁷ So was that a medical decision or a policy decision? The researchers go on to say, “This means less infant discomfort with the additional advantages of favoring parent compliance and improving the achievement and maintenance of adequate vaccination coverage at lower costs” (emphasis added). This savvy technique reduces the chance of parental resistance to a shot, akin to “habit stacking” where people who want to create a new habit will attach that new action to something they already do habitually.⁵⁸

Researchers noted, “Following the WHO recommendations, 190 countries have successfully introduced universal infant vaccination programs on a global scale.”⁵⁹

It’s important to note that the hepatitis B vaccine is still a routine recommendation for premature babies, even though published research shows increased health risks after vaccinations.⁶⁰

In congressional testimony at the 1999 hearing on whether the hepatitis vaccine was helping or hurting public health, Judy Converse, mother of a vaccine-injured child and public health professional, declared there was no benefit and only risk to giving hepatitis B vaccines to babies.⁶¹

Conclusion

Author Arthur Allen observed that when the hepatitis B vaccine was recommended for infants, “resistance to vaccination began to grow from a tiny hard core of ideological opponents into a larger, more mainstream group of skeptics. … [P]arents who found no fault with vaccination in general could still question whether the new injections were necessary.”⁶²

“Others felt, complacently perhaps, that they would not be raising children who would ever be putting themselves at risk of hepatitis B or that their child could get the shot later.”⁶³

“Many Americans, it seemed, didn’t like being asked to take a risk of any kind to prevent a disease they believed they could prevent perfectly well themselves.”⁶⁴

Like the HPV vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine recommendation mobilized religious families. In an Arkansas lawsuit, Susan Brock argued against a mandate that her children get a vaccine for an illness spread through sex and illegal drug use because “the only protection my children need is in Ephesians 6:13-14 which tells Christians to ‘take up the full armor of God’ and ‘stand firm.”⁶⁵ Another Arkansas mother declared the vaccine would “support the devil in his effort to encourage her daughter to engage in sex and intravenous drug use.”

“No one denied that hepatitis B was a bad disease. But educated parents could legitimately weigh their own instinctual aversion to injecting a foreign substance into their child against a risk that in early life was very tiny.”

And let’s not forget, the CDC’s less-is-more approach to information means parents cannot expect to be told the risks of this routine medical intervention — they must actively seek it.

Welcome to the world of politicized medicine, Mom and Dad. Did the doctors tell you any of this? Under the bright lights of truth, you’ll find the information you need to make the best decisions to keep your little ones safe. You may have to work harder to find the light, but once you do, you’ll find community too.

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REFERENCES

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   ↩︎
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17. Hornblum, Allen M, et.al. 2013. Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America. 1st ed. St. Martin’s Press. ↩︎
18. Hornblum, Allen M, et.al. 2013. Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America. 1st ed. St. Martin’s Press, page 99. ↩︎
19. Rivers, Thomas M., and Saul Benison. 1967. Tom Rivers Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science. An Oral History Memoir Prepared by Saul Benison. M.I.T. Press, page 499. ↩︎
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