[Presented December 4, 2025, at the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, CDC]
Good afternoon. My name is Toby Rogers. I have a Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of Sydney and a Master of Public Policy degree from UC Berkeley. I’m currently a Fellow at the Brownstone Institute where I write about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.
Using documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the Informed Consent Action Network demonstrated that the two most widely used hepatitis B vaccines in the country — Recombivax and Engerix — never should have been licensed by the FDA in the first place.
The clinical trials for Recombivax and Engerix:
- did not include a saline placebo control group;
- were too small to detect uncommon adverse events; and
- were too short to detect the majority of harms.
On that basis alone, Gold Standard Science requires that they be removed from the market.
The autism rate in this country has skyrocketed since the introduction of hepatitis B vaccines — from 1 in 5,000 children diagnosed with autism in the 1980s prior to the introduction of hepatitis B vaccines, to 1 in 31 children on the autism spectrum today.
A study by Thomas Verstraeten at the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1999 showed that the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine increased the relative risk of autism by more than eleven-fold. Soon thereafter Dr. Verstraeten went to work for GSK in Belgium and the CDC has been covering up his initial research findings ever since.
Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies by Gallagher and Goodman, published in 2008 and 2010, also show that hepatitis B vaccines significantly increase autism risk.
Hepatitis B vaccines have killed an astonishing number of children in the US over the last 35 years.
The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System contains 643 reports of death of children and 52,281 total reports of harm, in the US, across all ages, in connection with Recombivax and Engerix shots.
Hepatitis B is also a component in many combination vaccines including Pediarix and Vaxelis. The Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System contains 1,348 reports of death of children and 82,980 total reports of harm in the US, across all ages, following combination hepatitis B vaccines.
Remember that VAERS reports are a significant undercount of harms.
Respectfully, the proposed ACIP voting questions do not go far enough to address documented safety problems. Moving the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to 2 months would only produce a small reduction in autism and SIDS rates. Combination shots are NOT safer.
Moving the recommendation to age 12 would be better, but would increase autoimmune disorders and POTS cases in teenagers because of the high aluminum content in these shots. The fact remains that there are NO data proving the safety and efficacy of hepatitis B vaccines on day one, 2 months, or 12 years of age. Given that, I believe that hepatitis B vaccines should be removed altogether from the CDC childhood schedule.
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