NEW YORK - Mr Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s vaccine advisers will vote this week on whether to delay hepatitis B shots for most American children, the new chair of the committee said, a move that would be the most consequential change since the health secretary began remaking vaccine policy.

Delaying the decades-old practice of administering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns is an idea that has been pushed by long-time anti-vaccine activist Kennedy.

The committee has not settled on exactly how long to recommend pushing them back, the new committee head said in an interview. Some 3.5 million American children a year are recommended to get the shot on the day of their birth.

“We try to avoid giving things to the most vulnerable,” Dr Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist named to run the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said on Dec 1. “We want to test these things incredibly thoroughly before we give it to them, especially in a neonatal period or in a pregnant mother. So these are things that we have a very high suspicion of.”

A review of more than 400 studies and reports by independent vaccine experts released on Dec 2 found that the US policy of giving the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns cut infections in children by more than 95 per cent.

The vaccine advisory committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not spoken directly to vaccine makers about potential supply concerns they have raised that could result from delaying the shots, Dr Milhoan said.

“We’re not really dealing with that issue right now,” he said. “We haven’t had those discussions, and that might not be really appropriate for the (committee) to have those discussions outside of the meeting.”

Even small changes to the vaccination schedule could disrupt the supply of hepatitis B vaccine or others given in combination with that inoculation, such as the polio vaccine, for a year or longer, several vaccine makers and experts told Reuters.

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