SPRINGFIELD, MA— Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Richard E. Neal (D-MA) released the following statement after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel reversed a decades-long recommendation grounded in science that newborns should receive a first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth:
“The Trump Administration’s quackery is tearing down our public health system and destroying American lives as quickly as possible. By fulfilling this long-sought goal of the anti-vax movement, RFK, Jr. and Donald Trump have solidified that in their Administration, conspiracy theories come before facts.
“The birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine is an important, successful, and safe part of our comprehensive public health program to prevent disease and death that has been built over decades of research. This decision will leave newborns unprotected during an early and critical window in their lives and will have fatal consequences that are avoidable. There is nothing about this that will make America healthier, and the Republican silence, their allowance of this pseudoscience to infect and spread across our public health systems, threatens the decades of work that made the United States the gold standard of scientific research and public health.”
###
