Grand Canyon Times

Although hepatitis B vaccines for babies are required in most of the United States, the managing partner of a Phoenix law firm finds federal health officials unable to show any documented cases of the virus in a school setting.

To get to the bottom of a question that has been on many people’s minds, Aaron Siri, managing partner at Siri & Glimstad LLP, said on X that he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) over the necessity of hepatitis B shots.

As shown by the lawyer’s recently viral post, controversy over vaccines persists despite Arizona’s hepatitis B mandate taking effect in 1997. According to Arizona’s immunization guide, students in kindergarten through grade 12 needed at least three doses of the hepatitis B shot to begin the 2023-24 school year. The minimum age for some of these vaccines is birth to prevent what the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) describe as a potentially fatal and contagious liver disease.

Drawing 6.8 million views within days of the June 19 post, Siri revealed the results of that Freedom of Information Act request aimed at determining whether there’s sufficient documentation of hepatitis B being spread in an elementary, middle or high school setting. His request was made on behalf of nonprofit and nongovernmental ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network).

Siri shared the CDC’s response on X: “A search of our CDC records failed to reveal any documents” of “transmission of hepatitis B in an elementary, middle or high school setting.”

Siri then went on to explain why, in his view, the hepatitis B statistics in these settings are apparently non-existent, saying: “This is because hepatitis B is a bloodborne illness typically transmitted by sex workers or drug users sharing needles—not activities that occur in a classroom setting. And, of course, at the risk of stating the obvious, just because someone hasn’t gotten a Hep B vaccine doesn’t mean they have hepatitis B."

Citing the CDC, Siri said, “almost all children 6 years and older and adults with the hepatitis B virus recover completely and do not develop chronic infection.” He went on to put a cloud over the safety of these vaccines for children injected at birth and again at 1 and 6 months, noting that studies accounted for only four to five days of safety monitoring after the injections and that no placebo trials for two of the vaccines is used.

According to the CDC, hepatitis “Risk for chronic infection is related to age at infection: Approximately 90% of infected infants become chronically infected, compared with 2%–6% of adults. Chronic hepatitis B can lead to serious health issues, like cirrhosis (scarring of the liver) or liver cancer.”

Alabama is the only state that has not mandated hepatitis B vaccines for school children, according to immunize.org.