The Truth about RFK Jr

Chris_Halkides said:
The New York Times covered the Hepatitis B vaccine debate: "Hepatitis B is more common in other countries, especially in parts of Africa and Asia, in part because of low vaccination rates. The World Health Organization estimates that there are around 1.2 million new infections of hepatitis B each year globally. In 2022, the organization noted, over one million people died after contracting the virus, largely because of liver complications...But babies who are infected in the first year of life have about a 90 percent chance of developing a chronic infection. And about 30 percent of children infected between the ages of 1 and 5 develop chronic hepatitis B. Left untreated, chronic infections can lead to irreversible liver damage, scarring, failure and cancer over time. These complications can be deadly."
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Start preparing a LOT of tiny coffins.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
Here is Dr. Noc on the Hep B vaccine. He is very good at packing a good deal of information into a short period of time.
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Unfortunately I can't get it to play, because the audio won't stay on when the video starts. Usually I can play facebook videos but maybe they've done something new so we non-members can't do it. But I can guess who the idiot in the video is.
 
The problem is that as the vaccine changes the background rate of infection, the vaccine policy should change. We no longer vaccinate against smallpox, the UK shifted from the oral to the injected polio vaccine. It may be legitimately time to change from a universal neonatal vaccination policy to a selective one. The main driver to its continuation seems to be the inadequacy of maternal and child health care services in the US. Having said that the UK has a universal neonatal hepatitis B vaccine policy.

The problem is of course that the current leaders of health care policy in the US are not practicing evidence based decision but making prejudice based decision making.
 
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Planigale said:
The problem is that as the vaccine changes the background rate of infection, the vaccine policy should change. We no longer vaccinate against smallpox, the UK shifted from the oral to the injected polio vaccine. It may be legitimately time to change from a universal neonatal vaccination policy to a selective one. The main driver to its continuation seems to be the inadequacy of maternal and child health care services in the US. Having said that the UK has a universal neonatal hepatitis B vaccine policy.

The problem is of course that the current leaders of health care policy in the US are not practicing evidence based decision but making prejudice abject raving stupidity based decision making.
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Slightly fixed.
 
bruto said:
Unfortunately I can't get it to play, because the audio won't stay on when the video starts. Usually I can play facebook videos but maybe they've done something new so we non-members can't do it. But I can guess who the idiot in the video is.
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This is the the same video, where Dr. Noc rebuts misinformation.

Here is Dr. Noc's 26 minute discussion of the Hepatitis B vaccine with the University of Minnesota's Professor Michael Osterholm.
 
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Chris_Halkides said:
The New York Times reported today that, "The risk of “infection throughout your early stage of life, and probably throughout most of your childhood, is extremely low,” Retsef Levi, a panelist and a professor of operations management at Massachusetts of Technology.

“To quantify how low it is, it’s probably one in several millions,” he said."
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Dr. David Gorski discussed some broader issues at SBM, but he also discussed the ACIP meeting. He wrote, "It was also easy for a useful idiot like ACIP member Retsef Levi, an operations manager professor with no strong understanding of immunology, vaccines, infectious disease, or, truth be told, much about medicine, to go on and on about how the risk of hepatitis B in infants is so low, ignoring the obvious inference that the reason the risk of hepatitis B in infants is now so low has been decades of a policy recommending universal vaccination of infants in the neonatal period before they are sent home with their mothers. This was, of course, after a fallacy-filled presentation by Cynthia Nevison, PhD, an antivaxxer whom I called out in 2012 for co-opting the language of skepticism to try to portray vaccine advocates and science communicators refuting the false claim that vaccines were causing an “autism epidemic” as “autism epidemic deniers.” (As the great Charles Pierce would say, only the best people…)"
 
Planigale said:
It may be legitimately time to change from a universal neonatal vaccination policy to a selective one.
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Given how low the cost of vaccines are, especially when the price is negotiated at a national level, this would probably be more expensive for the NHS than just giving the vaccine.
A test is an additional cost, extra medical appointments to be missed and one more link in a chain that can go wrong generally
 
thaiboxerken said:
These are just advisories and not legally binding. A consequence of this, though, is that insurance companies use the CDC advisories as justification to cover or not cover procedures, drugs and vaccines.
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Then we must wait and see if the insurance companies will continue using CDC advisories over state advisories.

Well, I guess the answer is obvious: they'll go with the most financially advantageous advisory.
 
Regarding the discussion on Hepatitis-B vaccination, Canada leaves that up to the provinces.
  • New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory, and Nunavut routinely vaccinate at birth
  • Alberta gives three doses at age 10
  • Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan give two doses at age 11
  • Manitoba gives three doses at age 11
  • Ontario and Nova Scotia give two doses at age 12
Good comparative statistics for Canada and the USA are hard to come by. A lot of data are from 2021, while I'd prefer to see numbers for 2024. There are numbers for new and acute cases vs chronic infections. I can find a single numbers for Canada as a whole, while US numbers break them break them down by age group.

To get a feeling for the numbers, I asked the following question to several LLMs (AI):
Me said:
Most recent rates of new and acute Hepatits-B infections per 100,000, and chronic Hepatits-B infections per 100,000, for Canada and the USA
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  • Lumo AI at proton.me
  • ChatGPT 4o-mini via DuckDuckGo
  • ChatGPT 5 beta via DuckDuckGo
  • ChatGPT OSS 120B via DuckDuckGo
  • Llama 4 Scout via DuckDuckGo
  • Claude Haiku 3.5 via DuckDuckGo

LLM/AICanada - New/Acute per 100,000USA - New/Acute per 100,000Canada - Chronic per 100,000USA - Chronic per 100,000
Lumo0.3 (2021)0.7 (2023)690 (2021)265-570 (2023)
ChatGPT 4o-mini0.3 (2021)0.7 (2021)655 (no year)262-680 (no year)
ChatGPT 50.34 (2020)0.7 (2023)680 (2021)259 (2023)
ChatGPT OSS 120B0.6 (2022)0.4 (2022)210 (2022)260 (2022)
Llama 4 Scout1.4 (2020)0.9 (2020)137.9 (2020)205.1 (2020)
Claude Haiku 3.50.30.6 (2022)(no information)200

As you can see, the numbers are all over the place. Canada appears to have a lower new and acute rate, although recent data from the US shows improvement there. However, Canada might have higher chronic infection rate, depending on who you ask.

Conclusion: Hepatitis-B vaccinations at birth might not reduce the rate of new and acute infections. More study is needed, or at least better reporting is needed.

Caveat: Having said that, Hepatitis-B vaccinations at birth still sounds like a good idea.
 
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Undark republished an essay from reporter Barbara Rodriguez at the 19th that stated, "At another point, some panel members openly blamed immigrants for the existing cases of hep B in the United States, which are estimated to impact up to 2.4 million people, including non-immigrants." At Science-Based Medicine David Gorski wrote, "Meanwhile, [Cynthia] Nevison, toeing the Trump administration line, blamed immigrants for the infant hepatitis B cases that the US still sees:" The presentation apparently showed a slide that broke down total US births and showed a higher percentage of women who are HBsAg+ coming from East Asia than other parts of the world. If USAID still existed, supporting a mass vaccination plan might have been in their wheelhouse; TB was.
 
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At Beyond the Noise Paul Offit wrote, "Why did the RFK Jr.’s ACIP ignore these facts? One presentation turned the tide. Cynthia Nevison, a climate change and autism researcher from the University of Colorado with ties to the anti-vaccine movement, claimed that transmission within families did not apply “to the average American child.” Nevison had ignored the 1991 data showing that thousands of American children had acquired hepatitis B infections from sources other than their mothers." Here is a link to Dr. Nevison's research interests.
 
On Facebook Dr. Noc wrote, "ACIP’s vote to end the universal recommendation for the hepatitis B shot at birth flies in the face of high-quality medical evidence, reversing a policy that has prevented millions of infections and at least hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in the US alone. The birth dose has an outstanding safety record across four decades of robust data...One problem with all of this is that the resulting increase in Hepatitis B infections won’t necessarily show up in the headlines. They will show up years down the line as cirrhosis, liver cancer, and deaths."
 
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