Hepatitis B Vaccination for Newborns

Good Intentions, Bad Science, Worse Policy

Hepatitis B is a viral disease associated with risky lifestyle choices such as intravenous drug use or promiscuous sex. This virus causes a dangerous and miserable infection that can have long-lasting debilitating effects on the liver, so taking steps to prevent Hepatitis B is a good idea for those at risk.

For infants, Hepatitis B is an especially serious disease. If a pregnant mother carries this virus, it is certainly important to protect her baby from the disease.

However, most normal infants are at low risk for this disease. Infant infections are typically found only in babies born to a Hepatitis B-positive mother, and tests can determine who carries or is infected with the virus. By screening the mothers, only those babies who are at risk would need to be vaccinated at birth.

Perhaps any attempt at prevention would be a good bet if the vaccine were harmless, but it's not. Today there are more reports of adverse reactions from the vaccine than there are reported cases of the disease in children. Data created by the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in 1996 confirm 872 serious adverse events in children under 14 years of age who had been injected with Hepatitis B vaccine. These kids were either taken to an emergency room, had life-threatening health problems, were hospitalized, or were disabled following the vaccination. 214 had the Hepatitis B vaccine alone, and the rest received it in combination with other vaccines. 48 kids died after being injected with Hepatitis B vaccine in 1996, and 13 of them had received the Hepatitis B vaccine alone just before they died. In contrast, in 1996 only 279 cases of Hepatitis B disease were reported in children under age 14.

The World Health Organization only recommends infant vaccination for Hepatitis B in areas where carrier prevalence is 2 percent or greater. This does not apply to the U.S., except for certain ethnic groups in Alaska. But current U.S. health policy is based on an exaggerated perception of the prevalence of Hepatitis B, and here vaccination is required for every newborn.

An argument has been made that infants are easier and cheaper to vaccinate than adolescents. Does this mean we should vaccinate all infants in order to prepare them for the day when they might become promiscuous and/or intravenous-drug-using teenagers? Beyond this insulting presumption, lawmakers also presume that the vaccination will even last long enough to protect those kids during the supposedly risky teenage years.

This amazing degree of non-science and arrogance is shaping the national health policy for our families. Policymakers based their 1991 infant Hepatitis B vaccination recommendations on the assumption that the vaccinations would last from infancy through adolescence. However, scientific information has not only failed to support that premise, it has often contradicted it.

The story behind this policy is that the maker of Hepatitis B vaccine, Merck, makes almost $1 billion USD a year from this single product. One wonders how many lawmakers this amount of money could buy.

The cost to our society of all the injuries and medical services generated by this vaccine is incalculable. It’s time to require scientific proof that these vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary before we naively permit state-enforced injection of an unproven medicine into our newborns.

http://www.naturodoc.com/library/bio-war/HepB.htm
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