12/08/2025
My Thoughts on the Hepatits B Vaccination
As many of you may know, in addition to my role in cannabis and lifestyle medicine, I am a board-certified pediatrician with forty years of experience in the practice of medicine. While I do not believe most pediatricians are incentivized financially to give unnecessary treatments or vaccinations, I personally have never been in private pediatric practice so there has never been any financial or other incentive to give vaccinations, that I was not convinced by the scientific data, to be beneficial to the health and wellness of children.
As you may also know, I am not a big fan of pharmaceuticals and encourage lifestyle habits and nutrition to foster health and longevity. However, infection is a horse of another color. I am a proponent of vaccinations that prevent the infections that we saw routinely years ago - many that caused permanent disability or death.
Before the hepatitis B vaccine was made available, approximately 20,000 hepatitis B infections occurred in children under 10 years of age per year, approximately half of those infections occurred in newborns.
Not all of those newborn cases were contracted from Hep B positive mothers. Mothers can have false negative results; some mothers contracted the disease after their screening test was done, so some newborns are exposed to hepatitis B in the uterus even though their mother tested negative or the test results were not available at the time of delivery.
There is also the risk that the virus can be contracted after birth.
The virus can remain infectious on surfaces for at least 7 days. This means that even the tiniest speck of dried blood that may not even be visible to the naked eye can harbor the virus.
According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the country's premier pediatric hospitals, 65% of chronic hepatitis infections they see were in children born to mothers who did not test positive for hepatitis B! It's scary that the ACIP members who voted against newborn vaccinations were not aware of this!
Newborns do not have the immune system capable of killing the virus so unlike adults, ninety percent (90%) of infected newborns will develop chronic hepatic B. As a consequence, twenty-five percent (25%) of those chronic hepatitis patients will die prematurely from liver failure, cirrhosis, or liver cancer.
Since universal newborn hepatitis B vaccination was implemented in 1991, more than 6 million newborn hepatitis B infections have been avoided - meaning 1.5 million people have not died prematurely due to cirrhosis or liver cancer due to a history of neonatal infection.
New mothers, the hepatitis B vaccine was never mandated at the state or federal level and it will continue to be available. All you have to do is let your team know that you want your baby vaccinated! At birth! Waiting until the 2-month visit may be too late.
