The committee advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy voted on Dec. 5, 2025, to stop recommending that all newborns be routinely vaccinated against the hepatitis B virus, undoing a 34-year prevention strategy that has nearly eliminated early childhood hepatitis B infections in the United States.

Before the U.S. began vaccinating all infants at birth with the hepatitis B vaccine in 1991, around 18,000 children every year contracted the virus before their 10th birthday, about half of them at birth. About 90% of that subset developed a chronic infection.

In the U.S., one in four children chronically infected with hepatitis B will die prematurely from cirrhosis or liver cancer .

Today, fewer than 1,000 American children or adolescents contract the v

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