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A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel appointed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is scheduled to discuss and vote on the hepatitis B birth dose recommendation during its two-day meeting starting Dec. 4, potentially limiting children’s access.

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism.

He also said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” But decades of research shows the virus can be transmitted through indirect contact, when traces of infected fluids like blood enter the body when people share personal items like razors or toothbrushes…

President Donald Trump, Kennedy, and some newly appointed ACIP members have mischaracterized how the liver disease spreads, ignoring or downplaying the risk of transmission through indirect contact. The hepatitis B virus is far more infectious than HIV. Unvaccinated people, including children, can get infected from microscopic amounts of blood on a tabletop or toy, even when the infected person is asymptomatic…

Written by a physician. Friday will be the vote.
The Virus That Took My Father Could Become a Greater Threat www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/o…
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— Pier Georg Elser Marton (@pierelsermarton.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 2:56 PM

[Gift link]:

… My father was a chronic carrier, which as many as 2.4 million Americans are. Eventually up to 40 percent will develop liver complications. Hepatitis B disproportionately affects Asian Americans, accounting for more than half of all chronic cases, even though we make up just 7 percent of the U.S. population. My father was not an IV drug user, nor did he visit sex workers, despite the assumptions that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies have made about who gets hepatitis B.

He could’ve gotten the virus when he was born. Or maybe from his brother, or his caregivers, or his friends. Nobody knows. That’s why vaccinating everyone is so important, regardless of people’s perceived risks.

The hepatitis B vaccine — and the current recommendation to give it at birth — is likely why years later, as a doctor, I cannot recall caring for a patient with liver cancer caused by this virus. It was the world’s first anticancer vaccine. To think that members of my father’s generation may be the last to die from this devastating infection is to grasp how truly remarkable medical progress is.

Yet the Trump administration is set to make this extraordinary scientific achievement unavailable for the youngest, most vulnerable group of Americans. If the C.D.C. advisory committee votes to change the guidelines, even if parents request the shot, health insurance may not be required to pay for it. (Perhaps some insurers will cover it, recognizing that a central tenet of medicine is prevention.)…

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We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/o…
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— Joe Trippi (@joetrippi.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 7:07 AM

“The Real Meaning of MAHA Is You’re On Your Own” [gift link]:

In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.

It’s been nearly six years now since the United States’ first reported cases of Covid-19, and the country is in a merciful lull when it comes to pandemic recriminations, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing war on vaccine confidence now dominates the public health culture wars. But Bhattacharya, writing with his deputy Matthew Memoli in City Journal, returns with a bill of Covid complaints, arguing that to prepare for a future infectious disease threat, the country should toss out the longstanding “pandemic playbook” and focus instead on making the population “metabolically healthy” — what you might think of as being fit.

Forget social distancing, in other words; forget masks and forget even a next-generation equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to deliver a next-generation equivalent of miraculous Covid vaccines, which saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives abroad. The best way to fight off a novel infectious disease, Bhattacharya and Memoli write, is to get the country into better physical shape before the emergency arrives and bet that our fitter bodies will be capable of simply fending it off, whatever the pathogen, however quickly it might spread and however deadly it might be…

We clean people will live. If you weaker vessels must die, what is that to us?…

Change in Headline
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— Editing the Blue-Gray Lady (@nytdiff.bsky.social) November 27, 2025 at 12:10 AM

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The Undermining of the C.D.C. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202…
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— Ellen Greaves (@ecgreaves.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 12:46 PM

From the New Yorker, “The Undermining of the C.D.C.”:

Two weeks ago, by inserting what must be the most notorious asterisk in modern public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caveated its long-standing position that vaccines do not cause autism. Under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a C.D.C. web page now contends that this is “not an evidence-based claim” and that research linking vaccines to autism has been “ignored by health authorities.” The fact that the original statement remains at all is due to an agreement with Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and the chair of the Senate health committee, who disregarded decades of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism to advance his confirmation after extracting a set of flimsy commitments that Kennedy is now betraying. The Autism Science Foundation said that it is “appalled” by the C.D.C.’s new stance; the American Medical Association warned of “dangerous consequences.”

The Department of Health and Human Services maintains that it is hewing to “gold standard, evidence-based science”—a piece of doublespeak so thick that it might unsettle Orwell. Discounting dozens of rigorous studies that have analyzed millions of patients and failed to connect vaccines to autism, the C.D.C. website claims that about half of parents of children with autism believe vaccines contributed to that autism. It cited a decades-old paper that surveyed a few dozen parents who strongly embraced alternative medicine, at two private practices in the Northeast. The web page points out that autism rates have risen in recent decades and so has the number of infant vaccinations—an observation that might also be made about prestige TV shows and pumpkin-spice lattes. The H.H.S. will now provide “appropriate funding” for studies on vaccines and autism, and last week it appointed a physician with a history of vaccine skepticism as the second-in-command at the C.D.C. The episode puts to rest any doubts about whether Americans can still trust information from the nation’s top health agency.

At stake is a question of the quality of information that should be taken seriously in public discourse and how that information should be communicated. Science may be the most powerful engine for grasping reality, but it suffers a rhetorical disadvantage. In science, the burden of proof falls on the one aiming to overturn the “null hypothesis”—the default position that one thing doesn’t cause another. But conspiratorial thinking is fuelled by the inverse: self-assured conjecture that demands a level of refutation no amount of evidence can offer. Proving the absence of a connection will always be harder than speculating about its existence. The language of science is measured and provisional; the language of politics is declarative and bombastic. In September, President Donald Trump told pregnant women to “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol, because of a potentially increased risk of autism in children; his Food and Drug Administration clarified that “a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature.” Tylenol, the agency wrote, remains “the safest over-the-counter” option for treating fever or pain.

The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference…

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Do Unvaccinated Kids Make You Horny? • Don’t settle for being the scourge of CBER and the COVID ward at the children’s hospital when you can also be the scourge of Hinge
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— Rasmussen Retorts (@rasmussenretorts.skystack.xyz) November 30, 2025 at 6:30 AM

(Crass, but true — and hilarious.)

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Scientists: don’t feed the doubt machine
From climate to COVID, naivety about how science is hijacked promotes more of the same.
Required re-reading from @drtomori.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/d41…
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— Anne Sosin (@annesosin.bsky.social) November 16, 2024 at 9:36 AM