(Reuters) -The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet on December 4 and 5, and could vote on policy concerning shots for hepatitis B, a Federal Register notice from the agency showed on Wednesday.
The members of the panel, selected by health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., abandoned a vote at their most recent meeting in September that would have delayed the first hepatitis B vaccine dose for most newborns under federal recommendations.
Kennedy, an appointee of President Donald Trump, has been moving rapidly to rewrite U.S. vaccination policy, including dropping recommendations for COVID shots for pregnant women and children, directing states on limits to their vaccine mandates and cutting funding for mRNA-based vaccine research. Kennedy in June fired all 17 members of the CDC committee this year and replaced them with his own nominees.
Hepatitis B is a viral infection that causes liver inflammation. It primarily spreads through blood, semen or certain other body fluids.
Infants infected with hepatitis B at birth or during their first year of life have a 90% chance of developing a chronic infection, increasing the risk of serious liver disease such as cirrhosis or cancer.
The Federal Register entry said the meeting’s agenda will include discussions on vaccine safety, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule and hepatitis B vaccines. It said the committee may vote on the hepatitis B shots, but did not provide additional details on the specifics of that vote.
In September, the panel considered voting on delaying the first shot of the hepatitis B vaccine – currently recommended to be given at birth – for any children whose mother tests negative for the disease.
That vote was to delay the first dose for those children until the child is at least one month old. But Trump and others have suggested the shot should be delayed until children are at least 12 years old.
(Reporting by Puyaan Singh and Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Will Dunham)
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