The vote came this morning after a chaotic two-day meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. The panel voted to roll back a 30-year policy recommending all newborns receive hepatitis B vaccination at birth.
Back in June, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior fired the existing seventeen-member panel and appointed a smaller group including several people with ties to anti-vaccine organizations.
Dr. Bob Blair, a Frankfort pediatrician now in his 55th year of practice, said the new committee members lack the expertise needed to make these decisions.
"Kennedy made sure that the people that he placed are non-vaccinators," said Blair. "We've got people in charge that haven't looked at the studies. They're not looking at the correct statistics. They're looking at what Kennedy calls "gold standard" - which means he made it up."
The hepatitis B vaccine has been given to newborns since 1991. Annual hepatitis B infections among infants and children dropped by 99% following the universal birth dose recommendation.
Blair has seen the impact firsthand. Though hepatitis B often causes only mild infection symptoms as one has it, it can cause permanent damage to the liver, and is the leading cause of liver cancer.
"The illness is not very evident to the person that has it when they have it," explained Blair. "If they stop giving [the vaccine] to newborns in the hospital when they're delivered, they potentially could get it from a mother who was tested early and then caught hepatitis B after she was tested, or they could catch it from a caregiver other than their mother. So why they are wanting to go backwards and make this illness come back in children is insane."
Blair said modern vaccines are "a miracle," and attributed anti-vaccine sentiment to people forgetting what life was like before vaccines became widely available.
"The vaccines have been so effective people don't realize what they do. People have never seen what non-vaccination does to a community."
But Dr. Blair has. He learned about these diseases directly when his father, also a Frankfort pediatrician, brought him along to house calls as a child.
"He would put a stethoscope on me and I would listen," said Blair. "He would show me measles; he would show me chickenpox."
Blair himself survived polio as a child - a once-endemic disease which high vaccination rates eliminated in the United States. He's seen many vaccine successes throughout his career, including the pneumococcal vaccine, which did not yet exist when he began practicing in Frankfort in 1970.
"When we vaccinated the children, the grandparents' rate of pneumococcal pneumonia went down because the kids were giving their grandparents pneumococcus and they were getting pneumonia," said Blair. "So, by immunizing the children, we protected the grandparents. There's a herd effect, and then there's your own personal immunity, which protects you."
Blair also praised the success of the COVID-19 vaccine, which substantially reduces the chance of severe disease and death from COVID infection.
“They came out with that vaccine so rapidly that none of us could believe it. It was fantastic," said Blair. "That was one of Trump's triumphs, and I'm surprised that he didn't keep thinking about in that way: helping the United States, helping the people, and particularly helping the children."
Blair maintains a 100% vaccination rate among his patients. He said the trust he's built over generations of care helps decrease anti-vaccine sentiments at his practice.
"I know my patients. They know what my reaction is going to be, because I vaccinated them."
Though the CDC voted to remove the hepatitis B vaccine from its early childhood vaccine schedule, the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to recommend it - and it’s the latter’s guidance that Blair will continue to follow.
"This is going to damage children more than it's going to damage adults," said Blair. "The adult damage is going to be the grief from having their children suffer needlessly.”