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America’s vaccine skepticism is starting to show up in health data

RKF Jr. wanted parents to question the science. A study of 12 million newborns shows they listened.

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.

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All of this happened before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the nation’s health agencies. Now, he’s turned........

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