• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that newborn babies receive the hepatitis B vaccine on their first day of life.
• The infants, toddlers and young children receiving this vaccine face little to no chance of hepatitis B infection, but the vaccines impose significant risks, including the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune illness and even death.
• In the 0-1 age group, there is at least a 20:1 ratio of reported vaccine injuries/deaths associated with hepatitis B vaccines compared to cases of hepatitis B infection.
• The constitutionality of hepatitis B vaccine mandates in these populations where there is little risk for disease is arguably questionable.
• Hepatitis B vaccination mandates fail to honor young children’s liberty, equal protection, and health.

Unless their mothers harbor the virus (determined by routine prenatal blood testing), newborns are probably the least likely human beings on the planet at risk of actually getting hepatitis B.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) strongly recommend that newborn babies get the hepatitis B vaccine on their first day of life. About 12 million doses are administered to American babies in any given year. However, unless their mothers harbor the virus (determined by routine prenatal blood testing), newborns are probably the least likely human beings on the planet at risk of actually getting hepatitis B. Infection risks are also extremely low for young school-age children, but—in all but two states (Alabama and South Dakota)—three to four doses of hepatitis B vaccine are not only recommended but mandated for preschool attendance, K-12 education or both.

New cases of hepatitis B were low in the 1970s; they began climbing in the early 1980s (coincident with the HIV/AIDS epidemic) but then started falling again. Although the CDC first began recommending hepatitis B vaccination on a limited basis in 1982 for the small population of at-risk adults (and infants of infected mothers), the agency attributes the decline in hepatitis B cases during the 1980s and early 1990s to “reduction of transmission among men who have sex with men and injection-drug users, as a result of HIV prevention efforts.”

At the time, hepatitis B was a relatively “obscure” infection of “little direct relevance to most Americans,” but in the early 1990s the “picture of hepatitis B being held up before Americans” changed, as the CDC began promoting a more comprehensive hepatitis B vaccine dragnet. With a stark shift in policy emphasis toward universal vaccination for all newborns (1991), adolescents (1995) and children through age 18 (1999), “a vaccine with a limited initial target population [came] to be accepted as compulsory for every child in the country.”

A questionable rationale

From the beginning, hepatitis B vaccines have had their critics, who question the public health logic of across-the-board hepatitis B vaccination for infants and children. Whereas the young people being vaccinated face little to no chance of hepatitis B infection, the vaccines impose significant risks, including the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune illness and even death. In the decade from 1991 to 2001 (when hepatitis B vaccines contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal), vaccine exposure in early infancy resulted in an estimated 0.5-1 million U.S. children being diagnosed with learning disabilities, representing lifetime costs in excess of $1 trillion. Other hepatitis B vaccine ingredients (including aluminum adjuvants and yeast) as well as the vaccines’ use of recombinant DNA technology have been linked to a variety of adverse outcomes.

In 1986 (five years before the CDC began pushing for vaccination of all newborns), the nation documented fewer than 280 cases of hepatitis B infection in children under age 14; by 2006, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received over 23,000 reports of adverse events related to hepatitis B vaccination in the 0-14 age group, including nearly 800 deaths.

In congressional testimony in 1999, the father of a five-week-old who died immediately following a hepatitis B shot described a 20:1 ratio of VAERS reports compared to cases of hepatitis B infection in the 0-1 age group (likely an underestimate due to VAERS underreporting). Given that the vaccine has been shown—by the CDC itself—to wear off well before the age of any likely exposure to hepatitis B virus, the father concluded that hepatitis B mandates for newborns represented a “teaming up” of “ravenous corporate greed and mindless bureaucracy” against “common sense.”

The out-of-date legal context for mandates

The legal framework that seemingly permits compulsory childhood vaccination, including hepatitis B vaccine mandates for preschoolers, is astonishingly out-of-date. The U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed compulsory vaccination “in any depth” for over a century and has not revisited the issue at all since 1922, despite the fact that “the contours of the vaccine issue have changed fundamentally since the early 1900s” [. . .]

Continued at Kennedy News and Views: Children’s Health Defense Fund