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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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 [url=https://www.cdc.gov/sudden-infant-death/data-research/data/index.html]3,700 SIDS[/url] 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 [url=https://www.cdc.gov/fasd/data/index.html]1 in 1000[/url] 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.

[b]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?[/b]

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 [i]study[/i] 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."
[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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*[/quote]

There's absolutely a good way to prevent many childhood diseases. Genetically test every adult and send parents to jail if procreation causes know predictable diseases. Or is this too intrusive? It'd save a lot of money in medical and educational costs though.

150 kids is not significant enough to not allow a delay of two months because, as has been said ad nauseam, most kids have zero chance predictably to get hepB during that time. Mothers with unknown diagnosis are part of the group still required to get the vaccine.[/quote]

There was zero reason to delay the dose. None. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Whatever number of childhood infections you think is "significant" enough. [/quote]

Again you don't answer any questions when presented multiple opportunities. 99+% of kids have zero chance of getting hepB. That's the reason. It'd do more good for the hospital to force parents to breastfeed their kid before allowing discharge from the hospital but, of course, that's parental choice, right?[/quote]

You are really willing to contort yourself with bizarre solutions to a problem that’s already been solved by a beneficial vaccination.

This reminds me of the anti seatbelt people.  WELL WHAT IF THE CAR CATCHES ON FIRE AND YOU ARE TRAPPED!  It’s happened once!

Why don’t we just all make cars of marshmallows and give everyone reflex tests and cars can’t go above 5mph and a license should cost $50k and you can ride a bike made of marshmallows…

Like, or you can just wear a seatbelt.[/quote]

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