When a baby is born in a hospital in the US, one of the first things that happens — usually within 24 hours — is a hepatitis B shot, which prevents a virus that can cause liver cancer. The newborn shot has been a standard practice nationwide since 1991, after earlier efforts at prevention kept missing the mark. In the decades that have followed, most parents haven’t thought twice about it.
But over the past two years, more and more parents have started saying no. Because the birth dose is given inside the hospital, before the family goes home, there’s no appointment to miss, no chance of a scheduling mix-up — ways other childhood vaccines can be missed. If a newborn didn’t get this shot, in most cases, someone actively declined or delayed it.
A study published on February 23 in JAMA puts a clear number on that shift. The researchers tracked 12.4 million newborns — roughly a third of all US births — across hospitals in all 50 states that use Epic, one of the country’s largest electronic health record systems. Using years of prior data, the researchers modeled where vaccination rates should have been heading, and compared those projections to what was actually happening.
The study found that between 2023 and mid-2025, the share of newborns getting the hepatitis B birth dose fell from 83.5 percent to 73.2 percent. That translates to roughly “400,000 or more babies a year declining or delaying the hepatitis B [birth] vaccine,” said Joshua Rothman, a pediatrician at UC San Diego School of Medicine and the study’s lead author. For context, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of Minneapolis declining or delaying the shot every year.
Apparently, this has been happening for a while. The Hep B vaccine is declined because people don’t think a baby needs a shot against a sexually transmitted disease. But “the scientific answer — that hepatitis B can also spread during birth and through close household contact in infancy — is true, but harder to fit on a bumper sticker.” Well then, don’t bother trying because that’s all some people can understand.
The roots of this go back to the Covid pandemic, which reshaped how millions of Americans think about all vaccines — not just the Covid shot.
“This is a classic example of what we in the literature have come to refer to as a Covid-19 vaccine spillover effect,” said Matt Motta, a public health researcher at Boston University who studies vaccine hesitancy. Researchers have documented distrust of the Covid shot bleeding into general skepticism of flu vaccines, childhood MMR shots, even vaccination for pets. Polls have sent mixed signals about whether that skepticism is actually changing behavior — but a study like this captures what parents are doing, not what they are telling a pollster.
According to this article, Americans have been skeptical of “inoculations” since George Washington but until now we didn’t empower quacks like RFK Jr in the U.S. government to make it a policy. This is new.
Kids and adults will get sick and some will die. We’re seeing it with measles right now with some kids being permanently disabled because of it. And all because people are listening to snake oil salesmen and wellness influencers instead of the decades of scientific evidence that shows the vaccines are safe. It’s mod-boggling.