Hey, I'm Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Since 1955, when Congress passed the Polio Vaccination Assistance Act, the federal government

has pretty much been in the business of expanding access to vaccines. That is, until this year,

2025 has been filled with almost daily news headlines about federal agencies under the direction of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., casting doubt

on vaccine safety while taking steps that could rollback access. So how do we sort out what's just talk and what has teeth?

A year in, we are asking, what has this administration's stance on vaccines meant practically

for vaccine access and vaccine uptake? Here to tell us more are two reporters from KFF Health

News, the journalism arm of the nonprofit Health Research Foundation, KFF, Jackie Fortier, and

Arthur Allen. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us. Happy to be here. Let's start with

the recent news on the Hep B vaccine, Jackie. Just this week, the CDC ended. It's nearly

35-year recommendation that infants receive the vaccine for hepatitis B, you know, right after

birth. What does this recommendation change mean in practice? It's important to know what

hepatitis B is. So hepatitis B is a highly infectious virus that attacks the liver. It's transmitted through contact with infected bodily fluids, including blood. It can also be passed from mother to baby in late pregnancy and during birth. There is no cure for hepatitis B. It can scar the liver and cause liver failure and liver damage.

So it can eventually kill you. That's what we're trying to prevent. And there's a three-dose vaccine

that does an amazing job of preventing hepatitis B for decades. And also, if a baby is born with

hepatitis B, it can actually make sure that that virus doesn't

spread as long as it's given within the first 12 hours of life. Okay, so the timing matters.

Yes, timing is very, very important, especially for babies born to mothers whose viral status is

unknown. So if they don't know if they have hepatitis B or not, this changes the universal

birth dose recommendation to a risk-based one and kind of reverts us to pre-1991. The decision

wasn't really evidence-based, and hepatitis B vaccine has one of these, you know, very well-established

safety records of any vaccine. So as a consequence of this, there's going to be more

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