R.I.P. American children

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just heard on NBC news that if you want the vaccine at birth for your child, you can get it.
From google:
Hepatitis B (HBV) spreads through contact with infected blood, semen, or other body fluids, commonly via unprotected sex, sharing needles, from mother to baby during birth, or accidental needlesticks; it is not spread by food, water, or casual contact like hugging or sneezing, but can survive on surfaces for days. Key transmission routes include sexual contact, injection drug use, contaminated medical equipment (tattoos/piercings), and perinatal transmission.

How are Canada and Scandinavian countries able to do this by targeting high risk individuals?

Universal healthcare

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just heard on NBC news that if you want the vaccine at birth for your child, you can get it.
From google:
Hepatitis B (HBV) spreads through contact with infected blood, semen, or other body fluids, commonly via unprotected sex, sharing needles, from mother to baby during birth, or accidental needlesticks; it is not spread by food, water, or casual contact like hugging or sneezing, but can survive on surfaces for days. Key transmission routes include sexual contact, injection drug use, contaminated medical equipment (tattoos/piercings), and perinatal transmission.

How are Canada and Scandinavian countries able to do this by targeting high risk individuals?

Universal healthcare

DP also much lower Hep B carrier rates in general

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just heard on NBC news that if you want the vaccine at birth for your child, you can get it.
From google:
Hepatitis B (HBV) spreads through contact with infected blood, semen, or other body fluids, commonly via unprotected sex, sharing needles, from mother to baby during birth, or accidental needlesticks; it is not spread by food, water, or casual contact like hugging or sneezing, but can survive on surfaces for days. Key transmission routes include sexual contact, injection drug use, contaminated medical equipment (tattoos/piercings), and perinatal transmission.

How are Canada and Scandinavian countries able to do this by targeting high risk individuals?

Universal healthcare

DP also much lower Hep B carrier rates in general

Why? Keep asking that.

[Anonymous]

Or Google it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just heard on NBC news that if you want the vaccine at birth for your child, you can get it.
From google:
Hepatitis B (HBV) spreads through contact with infected blood, semen, or other body fluids, commonly via unprotected sex, sharing needles, from mother to baby during birth, or accidental needlesticks; it is not spread by food, water, or casual contact like hugging or sneezing, but can survive on surfaces for days. Key transmission routes include sexual contact, injection drug use, contaminated medical equipment (tattoos/piercings), and perinatal transmission.

How are Canada and Scandinavian countries able to do this by targeting high risk individuals?

Universal healthcare

DP also much lower Hep B carrier rates in general

Why? Keep asking that.

Historically lower, so what?

My sister died of a chronic liver disease due to Hepatitis C, acquired in childhood from a blood transfusion after cardiac surgery (before we screened for it in blood). It is a horrific way to die and she died as an adult; I cannot imagine watching a child go through what she went through.

There is zero, ZERO, benefit to delaying the Hep B vaccine, only harm, and children will die because of this administration.

[Anonymous]

This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

There is a preprint modeling study on the impact of delaying the vaccine. It is not worth it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1.full

The two month delay will result in 90 acute, 75 chronic infections, and 29 deaths, along with 16.4 million in costs.... And that is under perfect adherence at two months which will never happen.

I posted above - I watched my sister die of chronic hepatitis related liver failure acquired in childhood, though Hep C rather than B. It is hell, and even for kids who don't die, the wait for a liver transplant is awful; you have to get very sick to move up on the list, balanced with what happened to my sister as she then got too sick and died before she could get the transplant.

I am pissed at this decision which will cause needless suffering for children with no upside to the delay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The reason some European countries can delay it is because of universal health care. Those babies will be seeing pediatricians and getting it at 2 months or whatever. In America, with our crappy healthcare system, a lot of babies are born and will not see a pediatrician again in a timely manner. These children will get infected, and some will die. It also means they will give the disease to others, and more people will die. That's why we went to a vaccinate at birth policy.

The White House just put out a memorandum that HHS needs to " align U.S. core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer, developed countries". Interesting, especially as in most other matters (like environmental regulations), the White House is dismissing the approaches of other, "peer, developed countries".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reason some European countries can delay it is because of universal health care. Those babies will be seeing pediatricians and getting it at 2 months or whatever. In America, with our crappy healthcare system, a lot of babies are born and will not see a pediatrician again in a timely manner. These children will get infected, and some will die. It also means they will give the disease to others, and more people will die. That's why we went to a vaccinate at birth policy.

The White House just put out a memorandum that HHS needs to " align U.S. core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer, developed countries". Interesting, especially as in most other matters (like environmental regulations), the White House is dismissing the approaches of other, "peer, developed countries".

I wish we did that for education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's no reason why the hep b vax can't be pushed a few months like every other vaccine for the vast majority of people. The odds of contracting it are very low outside of the high risk population.

Such ignorance. The high risk populations are also less likely to get prenatal care, so a Hep B infection of the mother may not be picked up. And I guess the infants of high risk parents don't deserve to be protected? Do we not care if they end up sick and with early liver cancer? Even if you don't care (I do), perhaps you might care if you think that these kids are also more likely to be on Medicaid, so if they end up with Hep B due to transmission at birth, they will cost the taxpayers more $.

This. This is also why it’s “fine” in countries with socialized health care - people get screened and maternal health care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

There is a preprint modeling study on the impact of delaying the vaccine. It is not worth it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1.full

The two month delay will result in 90 acute, 75 chronic infections, and 29 deaths, along with 16.4 million in costs.... And that is under perfect adherence at two months which will never happen.

I posted above - I watched my sister die of chronic hepatitis related liver failure acquired in childhood, though Hep C rather than B. It is hell, and even for kids who don't die, the wait for a liver transplant is awful; you have to get very sick to move up on the list, balanced with what happened to my sister as she then got too sick and died before she could get the transplant.

I am pissed at this decision which will cause needless suffering for children with no upside to the delay.

Those numbers are not even significant. (165 infections/3,628,934 live births) equals 0.000045%. Given that the vast majority can be predicted, many can also be avoided. For comparison, there were 3,700 SIDS deaths during 2022. Yet nobody's screaming about a SIDS epidemic. Is it because there's no economic argument (i.e., lifetime cost) because they all died???

Similarly FASD rate is 1 in 1000 live births, yet there's hardly anything said about drunk mothers other than the obvious. I'm sure I could easily think of a dozen more if I was bored enough.

What about Tay-Sachs, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, etc.? How about Rh blood type incompatibility? All of these cost a lot money and are highly predictive. Where's the outrage for these parents?

Maybe if the government provided all these vaccines for free, after being purchased "below cost" from the drug companies (unlike Covid vaccines where they made out like bandits), they could at least demonstrate how essential and timely they need to be for newborns and infants who live 99% of the time at home. Even asking parents to pay for this (even with insurance), when the chances of acquiring HepB within two months is so low, is ridiculous.

And as for that rushed study because timeliness is more important than fact checking: "This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

There is a preprint modeling study on the impact of delaying the vaccine. It is not worth it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1.full

The two month delay will result in 90 acute, 75 chronic infections, and 29 deaths, along with 16.4 million in costs.... And that is under perfect adherence at two months which will never happen.

I posted above - I watched my sister die of chronic hepatitis related liver failure acquired in childhood, though Hep C rather than B. It is hell, and even for kids who don't die, the wait for a liver transplant is awful; you have to get very sick to move up on the list, balanced with what happened to my sister as she then got too sick and died before she could get the transplant.

I am pissed at this decision which will cause needless suffering for children with no upside to the delay.

Those numbers are not even significant. (165 infections/3,628,934 live births) equals 0.000045%. Given that the vast majority can be predicted, many can also be avoided. For comparison, there were 3,700 SIDS deaths during 2022. Yet nobody's screaming about a SIDS epidemic. Is it because there's no economic argument (i.e., lifetime cost) because they all died???

Similarly FASD rate is 1 in 1000 live births, yet there's hardly anything said about drunk mothers other than the obvious. I'm sure I could easily think of a dozen more if I was bored enough.

What about Tay-Sachs, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, etc.? How about Rh blood type incompatibility? All of these cost a lot money and are highly predictive. Where's the outrage for these parents?

Maybe if the government provided all these vaccines for free, after being purchased "below cost" from the drug companies (unlike Covid vaccines where they made out like bandits), they could at least demonstrate how essential and timely they need to be for newborns and infants who live 99% of the time at home. Even asking parents to pay for this (even with insurance), when the chances of acquiring HepB within two months is so low, is ridiculous.

And as for that rushed study because timeliness is more important than fact checking: "This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

The point is there is no benefit to delaying, only downside. We are talking about kids here. I do think additional deaths are significant when there is literally no reason to delay the vaccine, only downside. PS, it is not just about deaths but chronic disease. Liver disease sucks even if you don't die from it, especially if it is a child! Again, I watched my sister die of liver failure.

If we had an easy, low cost way to prevent the current level of SIDS deaths and just decided to delay it, that also would be a tragedy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

There is a preprint modeling study on the impact of delaying the vaccine. It is not worth it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1.full

The two month delay will result in 90 acute, 75 chronic infections, and 29 deaths, along with 16.4 million in costs.... And that is under perfect adherence at two months which will never happen.

I posted above - I watched my sister die of chronic hepatitis related liver failure acquired in childhood, though Hep C rather than B. It is hell, and even for kids who don't die, the wait for a liver transplant is awful; you have to get very sick to move up on the list, balanced with what happened to my sister as she then got too sick and died before she could get the transplant.

I am pissed at this decision which will cause needless suffering for children with no upside to the delay.

Those numbers are not even significant. (165 infections/3,628,934 live births) equals 0.000045%. Given that the vast majority can be predicted, many can also be avoided. For comparison, there were 3,700 SIDS deaths during 2022. Yet nobody's screaming about a SIDS epidemic. Is it because there's no economic argument (i.e., lifetime cost) because they all died???

Similarly FASD rate is 1 in 1000 live births, yet there's hardly anything said about drunk mothers other than the obvious. I'm sure I could easily think of a dozen more if I was bored enough.

What about Tay-Sachs, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, etc.? How about Rh blood type incompatibility? All of these cost a lot money and are highly predictive. Where's the outrage for these parents?

Maybe if the government provided all these vaccines for free, after being purchased "below cost" from the drug companies (unlike Covid vaccines where they made out like bandits), they could at least demonstrate how essential and timely they need to be for newborns and infants who live 99% of the time at home. Even asking parents to pay for this (even with insurance), when the chances of acquiring HepB within two months is so low, is ridiculous.

And as for that rushed study because timeliness is more important than fact checking: "This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

It is not about an "epidemic" it is that there is simply no reason to delay the vaccination and lead to increased infections in kids, even if the numbers are small. It is utter stupidity for literally no benefit at the expense of kids' lives and livelihood. A few kids matters to me. Your response ticked me off having watched someone I love die of liver disease acquired in childhood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is a delicate discussion that deserves a much greater degree of sensitivity than people give it credit for.

There are good reasons for giving the hep B vaccine at birth: hepatitis B can readily be passed from mother to child; the vaccine can likely prevent the overwhelming majority of occasions where a child catches hep B from his or her mother; chronic hep B infections can lead to liver cirrhosis or cancer.

There are also good reasons for not mandating the hep B vaccine at birth across the board: mothers are screened for hep B; some portion of children will have serious side effects from the vaccine; it is widely regarded as medically unethical to administer a medical intervention that is unnecessary, not least because it is a fact of life that most medical interventions have a financial upside to someone somewhere.

The choice ultimately comes down to a subjective value judgment: is it the value of inoculating children whose mothers are hep B positive but received a false negative on the screener greater than the cost of known and unknown vaccine side effects?

What complicates this issue is the asymmetry in harms: if “don’t mandate it” crowd is wrong, you know exactly what harm results—a baby gets hep B. If, however, the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, and some appreciable degree of harm results to some meaningful number of babies from the shot, it’d be really hard to know; you just can’t run a years-long double-blind placebo-controlled study to see how health outcomes differ between people vaccinated at birth against hep B and those who were not. So, if the “let’s mandate it” crowd is wrong, we probably wouldn’t notice it.

On balance, I’m comfortable with the decision not to mandate it. If you’re in a stable, loving marriage with no history of hep B risk factors and if you test negative on the hep B screener, there’s probably a good chance that you’d pass the option up if you weren’t so distracted watching the miracle of life. But I understand why people see it differently.

For those of you whose passions run hot on this issue, I’d urge compassion and kindness.

There is a preprint modeling study on the impact of delaying the vaccine. It is not worth it.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.25340907v1.full

The two month delay will result in 90 acute, 75 chronic infections, and 29 deaths, along with 16.4 million in costs.... And that is under perfect adherence at two months which will never happen.

I posted above - I watched my sister die of chronic hepatitis related liver failure acquired in childhood, though Hep C rather than B. It is hell, and even for kids who don't die, the wait for a liver transplant is awful; you have to get very sick to move up on the list, balanced with what happened to my sister as she then got too sick and died before she could get the transplant.

I am pissed at this decision which will cause needless suffering for children with no upside to the delay.

Those numbers are not even significant. (165 infections/3,628,934 live births) equals 0.000045%. Given that the vast majority can be predicted, many can also be avoided. For comparison, there were 3,700 SIDS deaths during 2022. Yet nobody's screaming about a SIDS epidemic. Is it because there's no economic argument (i.e., lifetime cost) because they all died???

Similarly FASD rate is 1 in 1000 live births, yet there's hardly anything said about drunk mothers other than the obvious. I'm sure I could easily think of a dozen more if I was bored enough.

What about Tay-Sachs, sickle cell, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, etc.? How about Rh blood type incompatibility? All of these cost a lot money and are highly predictive. Where's the outrage for these parents?

Maybe if the government provided all these vaccines for free, after being purchased "below cost" from the drug companies (unlike Covid vaccines where they made out like bandits), they could at least demonstrate how essential and timely they need to be for newborns and infants who live 99% of the time at home. Even asking parents to pay for this (even with insurance), when the chances of acquiring HepB within two months is so low, is ridiculous.

And as for that rushed study because timeliness is more important than fact checking: "This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

It is not about an "epidemic" it is that there is simply no reason to delay the vaccination and lead to increased infections in kids, even if the numbers are small. It is utter stupidity for literally no benefit at the expense of kids' lives and livelihood. A few kids matters to me. Your response ticked me off having watched someone I love die of liver disease acquired in childhood.

There would certainly be outrage for those parents if we had a simple low cost way of preventing those diseases and just decided not to because...*fake reasons*

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is no need for a Hep B vax for newborns unless the mother is positive. None at all.

Where did you get your medical degree?