MedPage Today on Wednesday ran the latest in a series of mainstream articles defending the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine as safe, effective and necessary for every newborn baby born in the U.S.
The articles are in response to concerns recently raised by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., chair of the vaccine advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
At his first meeting in June, Kulldorff announced that the panel may revisit its longstanding recommendation that the vaccine be given to all babies at birth.
MedPage said Kulldorff and Kennedy’s assertions “could erode public confidence in a vaccine credited with virtually eliminating childhood transmission of the virus in the U.S.”
Critics have long raised concerns about the safety and necessity of giving the vaccine to newborns, particularly those not at risk for the disease. Today, the Hep B vaccine contains at least 250 micrograms of aluminum, and aluminum exposure has been linked to autism.
Hepatitis B is a liver disease caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV). It can range from a mild, short-term, acute illness lasting a few weeks to a serious, long-term, chronic infection.
The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids, most often by sexual contact or sharing IV drug equipment. In the U.S., IV drug use is the most common risk factor for the disease, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Infected pregnant mothers can pass the disease to their infants. In the U.S., an estimated 25,000 pregnant women per year — or 0.69% — have HBV. About 1,000 of those women pass the virus to their babies, according to HHS.
Women can be tested for the disease to see if their babies would benefit from vaccination, but that’s not what the CDC recommends.
Instead, children are required to receive the Hep B vaccine to attend either childcare, school or both, in every state except Alabama.
Dr. Kristen Marks, an infectious disease specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, told MedPage the Hep B vaccine is “a safe vaccine that prevents liver disease and liver cancer.” It “makes no sense” to question the use of such a drug, she said.
However, the vaccine does not prevent cancer. It is designed to prevent HBV, which can lead to liver cancer in some people if the disease goes untreated. Yet “almost all children 6 years and older and adults infected with acute HBV recover completely with no lasting liver damage,” according to the CDC.
An Aug. 14 analysis of a clinical trial and immunological data by James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., also raises doubts about whether the dose given to newborns is effective. Instead, immunity appears to be conferred after the entire series of shots.
That, combined with substantial evidence of the vaccine’s dangers, has raised concerns about the existing recommendation.
Hep B vaccine, other mandatory shots not reviewed in more than 7 years
At the June meeting of the CDC’s revamped Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Kulldorff asked:
“Is it wise to administer a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to every newborn before leaving the hospital? That’s the question. Unless the mother is hepatitis B positive, an argument could be made to delay the vaccine for this infection, which is primarily spread by sexual activity and intravenous drug use.”
Kulldorff, a former Harvard epidemiologist tapped by Kennedy to lead ACIP, announced the committee was forming two new work groups. One group would look at the cumulative effect of the childhood and adolescent vaccination schedules, and another would look at vaccines that have not been reviewed “in more than seven years.”
The latter group includes the Hep B shot.
MedPage said Kulldorff’s claim about how HBV is spread was “inaccurate,” because in “highly endemic areas, hepatitis B is most commonly spread from mother to child at birth.”
However, HBV is not endemic in the U.S. Its prevalence is estimated at 0.6%, and the public health agencies say IV drug users are at greatest risk.
Articles in MedPage and other mainstream publications also cited a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, where Kennedy claimed “without evidence” that suppressed CDC data linked the vaccine to autism, with one study showing a “1,135% elevated risk of autism.”
MedPage asked HHS for the study cited by Kennedy, but received no response. It concluded there was no “credible evidence” that the study existed. MedPage also quoted Chari Cohen, who said she had never seen such a study and didn’t know anyone who had.
The risk percentage can be found in a series of studies the CDC completed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which the group Safe Minds obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The studies, which examined the relationship between thimerosal and autism in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink, found a strong link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and medications — including HBV treatments — and autism.
One of those analyses identified a 1,135% elevated risk of autism — or an 11.35 times greater risk — for infants exposed to high levels of thimerosal.
The researchers repeated the study multiple times, manipulating the groups they included and changing the way they analyzed the data in an attempt to water down the results.
Lead investigator Thomas Verstraeten, in an email to his colleagues with the subject line “it just won’t go away,” said he was having trouble eliminating evidence of harm within the first month of a baby’s life.
With each new iteration of the study, the risks shown were reduced or eliminated. Eventually, the researchers achieved results that were published in Pediatrics, and used to claim there was no link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism.
The documents obtained by Safe Minds provide “strong support for the autism-mercury hypothesis,” along with evidence of how data can be manipulated, according to the group.
“The pattern of behavior constitutes malfeasance and should not be permitted to stand,” they wrote. “It is time to remove the parties involved from their role in vaccine safety assessment and to subject the VSD database to open and independent review.”
Why did the Hep B vaccine get added to the childhood schedule?
In an article published in the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland questioned the constitutionality of requiring children to receive the Hep B vaccine for school attendance, especially since CDC data show transmission is unlikely through routine contact among children.
The CDC’s position on mass vaccination for children changed after the pharmaceutical companies got legal protection from liability.
When ACIP made its first Hep B vaccine recommendation in 1982, the CDC recognized that the U.S. had “low HBV prevalence” and recommended the shot for high-risk people only, including healthcare workers, people likely to be in sexual or “needle stick” contact with an infected person and infants born to infected mothers.
In 1988, the committee called for all pregnant mothers to be screened to determine if vaccination was necessary. At that time, it was estimated that 16,500 mothers per year were infected and, without vaccination, an estimated 3,500 infants would become chronic carriers.
Later that year, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), created by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, was established. The law protects vaccine makers from liability for injuries related to vaccines on the CDC’s childhood schedule.
The VICP was intended to provide an alternative means of compensating people who suffer “accidental injury or death” from taking those vaccines.
By 1991, the CDC was describing HBV risks differently, saying the consequences of infection were “major health problems” in the U.S. — even though rates had not changed and only a few hundred children were infected.
The CDC advisory committee concluded that because it was challenging to vaccinate only people at risk for HBV, mass immunization against the virus was “the most effective means of preventing HBV infection and its consequences.”
The committee recommended that all infants be vaccinated, regardless of their mothers’ HBV status, and the Hep B vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule.
Related articles in The Defender
- Hep B Vaccines Come With High Risk, Little Benefit — Why Does CDC Recommend Them for Every Newborn?
- Safety Data on Hepatitis B Vaccine for Newborns ‘Sadly Lacking’
- Judge Rules in Favor of Teen in Medical Exemption Lawsuit Funded by Children’s Health Defense
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
