Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Dec. 3, 2025, that his department was investigating whether a school in the Midwest vaccinated a student without family consent. a school in the Midwest vaccinated a student without family consent.
Valencia P. Walker, MD, MPH, FAAP is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.

A major change is looming for the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule. As a neonatologist who cares for critically ill newborns and infants, I am dreading what will happen to children and families.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee – a panel handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – is scheduled to meet Dec. 5 on whether to continue administering the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns and reexamine other vaccination schedules.

One might question why babies need a vaccine for an infection that you probably learned happens when people who use IV drugs share needles, or from having sex. Turns out, hepatitis B is much more contagious than we thought; kids can even get it from playing with toys.

Once you have hepatitis B, you have it for life. There is no cure.

Children will die under RFK Jr.'s Centers for Disease Conspiracies

The bigger problem is that individuals might not even know they have it. The virus can hide for years before causing liver failure and cancer. A fetus can be infected during pregnancy, or a baby can be infected after birth. Infants can become infected when a relative with no symptoms comes to visit. If a day care worker or another child has it, it can spread to other children without anyone knowing.

After the CDC started recommending the hepatitis B vaccine in 1991, infections in kids dropped from approximately 18,000 cases per year to roughly 20 cases per year. That one change meant we went from a school bus full of 50 kids being infected every day for a year to not even enough kids to play each other in a football game.

The hepatitis B vaccine has prevented more than 500,000 childhood infections and an estimated 90,000 childhood deaths.

Doctors like me didn’t ask the vaccine advisory committee to take away this safety net; in fact, we strongly urge the CDC to keep it in place.

Despite the unrelenting push to prove a link between immunizations like the hepatitis B vaccine and autism, children develop autism for many different reasons. There is no one culprit we can blame or eliminate to create a 100% effective cure. So, even if we never jabbed another kid, pediatricians would still be diagnosing children with autism.

This isn’t me giving you some random talking points. I have taken care of babies with liver failure. And I've previously researched how newborns fight infections. Compared with you and me, it can be more difficult for infants to fight off certain types of infections. No amount of seaweed, kale, oat milk, probiotics or powdered echinacea can turbocharge the hardwired processes that help our immune systems mature over time.

That’s why the Centers for Disease Control must not devolve into the Centers for Disease Conspiracies. This fixation on vaccines is a distraction, and it will gravely harm our children.

Eliminating or delaying childhood vaccines would mean that pediatricians, neonatologists, pediatric intensivists and pediatric oncologists would find themselves consoling more families of children who died from lockjaw (botulism), meningitis, measles, liver cancer and so many other preventable diseases. It’s already happening with whooping cough (pertussis). This disease is surging in states that have rolled back vaccinations.

Parents have the right to make decisions informed by real vaccine science

Certainly, parents do have the right to make informed decisions about the health of their children. The best decisions, however, are rooted in love and empowered by knowledge.

I know firsthand that this truth does not change, even when the decisions are difficult – and possibly judged, criticized and misunderstood. As a physician, I have sat with parents as they made the gut-wrenching decision to remove the breathing tube from a child at the end stages of a terminal disease, like liver cancer. Their decision was an undeniable act of unconditional love, not a failure of parenting.

But do you know what has become harder for me to do than sitting at a hospital bedside with grieving parents? Staying silent as more and more parents decide not to vaccinate their newborns.

To be sure, I don’t judge or blame them. I think it has become an unconscionable failing of our society that parents are being pushed into decisions fueled by fear and by the chaos manufactured by government institutions that now seem to prioritize the interests of billionaires over the health and well-being of the general public.

However, if Secretary Kennedy is serious about “Making America Healthy Again,” it cannot be at the expense of the most vulnerable Americans. We must focus on effective public health policy, one founded on evidence-based science. A strong and healthy society should use vaccines that protect babies against preventable infections rather than chase conspiracy theories that people continue to invent.

Valencia P. Walker, MD, MPH, FAAP is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: I'm a doctor. The babies I treat will suffer from delayed vaccines.

Reporting by Dr. Valencia P. Walker, Opinion contributor / USA TODAY

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