WASHINGTON — A federal vaccine advisory committee began meeting Thursday to discuss whether newborns should still get the hepatitis B vaccine — the first shot found to prevent cancer.

Newborn hepatitis B vaccinations are widely considered to be a public health success story. Over about 30 years, cases among children fell from about 18,000 per year to about 2,200.

But U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s committee is considering whether to recommend the birth dose only for babies whose mothers test positive, which would mark a return to a public health strategy that was abandoned more than three decades ago. For other babies, it will be up to the parents and their doctors to decide if a birth dose is appropriate.

Hepatitis B is a serious liver infection that, for most p

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