An advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will vote Dec. 5 whether to recommend that children should be vaccinated against the highly infectious hepatitis B virus at birth or at a later age.
Newborn infants are first vaccinated against the incurable virus within 24 hours after birth. But the CDC's influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices could support delaying the vaccines until children are older.
The vote, originally scheduled for Dec. 4, was delayed a day. It could reverse decades of declines in new infections, public health officials say.
The advisory committee itself has undergone controversial changes. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 sitting members of the panel in June and replaced them with choices of his own. Kennedy is viewed by many as a vaccine skeptic.
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