MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: Victims of success

How the White House is trying to bend medicine and industry to its will

In today’s letter: How the CDC’s latest vaccine study may be meant to hide the truth, and why CEOs might want to start thinking like labor leaders.

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THE GIST: Keeping us in the dark on vaccines

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, dominated by handpicked anti-vaccination activists, announced that it would no longer recommend all infants receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth — despite overwhelming evidence of the vaccine’s safety and efficacy when administered as early as possible. Since the birth dose was widely introduced in 1991, the disease has been nearly eliminated in children; cases have declined by 95 percent. And that’s a good thing, since chronic infections lead to liver disease and cancer in as many as 25 percent of cases.

There was some surprise, then, when this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also announced it would fund a new hepatitis B birth-dose vaccine safety study.

But that’s not good news. And here’s why.