Providers are reeling from a change last week by a federal agency responsible for setting and updating vaccination guidelines for American children and adults.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which crafts immunization guidelines that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention then adopts and disseminates to the public, voted 8-3 on Dec. 5 to loosen the recommendations around giving the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns at birth, shifting a 30-year recommendation toward individual decision-making between families and clinicians for mothers who test negative for the virus. It still recommends vaccination for the babies of those who test positive.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all members of the committee in June and replaced them with a

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