Original URL: https://merylnass.substack.com/p/

My testimony today to the New Hampshire Senate on the mandate for Hepatitis B vaccines (especially for newborns in the first 12 hours of life)

NH HB 1719 (2026) removes the Hepatitis B vaccination from the mandatory list for school and daycare attendance in New Hampshire. The bill passed the House in February 2026

Apr 02, 2026

Here is the Bill:

https://legiscan.com/NH/text/HB1719/id/3290386

The Senate Health committee today heard from about half a dozen local pediatricians (including the current and immediate past presidents of the NH AAP) and family practitioners and some others about how important the shot was. Some implied it would not be accessible if the mandate were lifted—a falsehood. Most claimed there was fully informed consent, ignoring the fact that the shot is given immediately after birth to newborns and most mothers, especially those with C/sections, are not in top form to carefully consider the pros and cons at that point in time. CDC says it is necessary to give the shot within the first 12 hours after birth.

However, not a single person providing that type of testimony would go near the actual statistics on Hepatitis B for the US or for New Hampshire. Even the state epidemiologist and the state chief medical officer, both physicians, could only promise to provide that information sometime in the future—I assume they had been instructed to hide the numbers.

The Universisty of Colorado states that while there are roughly 18,000 mothers who give birth with hepatitis B annually in the US, and allegedly some 15% have not been screened (so their newborns are not correctly treated with both immune globulin and a full course of vaccines), there are only 20 cases of neonatal hepatitis B in the US per year.

I have a simple and effective way to cure both excessive vaccinations and missed treatment of exposed newborns, and the method has been proven to work in other cases. You simply impose a financial penalty on the medical provider and hospital or other facility each time no one obtained or checked a hepatitis B screen—and the system will focus laser-like on getting it right, finally.

Here is my testimony:

Testimony on the Hepatitis B vaccine for New Hampshire

My name is Meryl Nass, MD: trained in internal medicine, the same as NH state epidemiologist Dr. Chan. My Maine medical license was suspended for treating COVID with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and for spreading accurate, but so-called mis-information on the covid vaccines. There has never been a patient complaint to a medical board about me and I have never been accused of malpractice. I am in litigation over my license and am a new resident of New Hampshire. I am fully vaccinated except for COVID and flu shots.

I have testified 6x to Congressional committees on anthrax and smallpox vaccines, but I am also very knowledgeable about the Hepatitis B vaccine. You may find what I say surprising–which is why I have provided footnotes to FDA, CDC and other reputable sources to show that the federal policy of universal newborn vaccination lacks a logical basis.

I was exposed to highly infectious Hep B as an intern in 1982 and received the earliest vaccine, made from the blood of Hep B sufferers. I then received several more shots of newer Hep B vaccines. To my knowledge I had no side effects.

I am not anti-vaccine. I am pro a risk-benefit analysis for all medical interventions, including vaccines, which are often presented as risk-free.

Vaccine side effects have in general been minimized in the research literature, because the studies are short, and the majority of serious side effects do not show up right away. They show up after the surveillance for side effects has ended.
When the Engerix-B[1] and Recombivax[2] vaccines were licensed, the studies presented looked at side effects for no more than 5 days.
Vaccines cost money to buy and to administer. For individual hepatitis B vaccines, the cost to administer 3 doses in the private sector is about $150 per child, and a bit over $100 when the federal Vaccines for Children program, initiated during the Clinton administration, is paying.[3]
There were 12,593 births reported in New Hampshire in 2025 and roughly 12,000 yearly.[4] The total cost to provide 3 Hepatitis B vaccines to each is around $1.6 million dollars per year.
We do not know the cost of caring for a Hep B patient who missed their vaccine.
Nor do we know the cost of caring for the side effects of babies given the vaccine during the first 12 hours immediately after birth who did not need it–because no one knows what an injured baby would have been like had they not received the vaccine, because there is no prior experience with that baby.

Therefore, there must be a measurable benefit to give a vaccine. There is considerable benefit if the mother is Hepatitis B positive. But vaccinating the newborn of a Hepatitis B mother is not enough to prevent infection. You must also provide a second drug: hepatitis B immune globulin. Therefore, it is critical that every mother giving birth be tested and the test results made available at the time of birth. Because simply vaccinating each newborn because a mother may not have been tested, or because the results were misplaced, does not solve the problem of mother-to-child transmission.

In other words, in order to prevent Hepatitis B in newborns, it is critical to have the Hepatitis B surface antigen test result–so that affected newborns can be properly treated with an antibody preparation. Why would we give a 3 shot series over six months if one dose provided protection to a newborn, who has a very immature immune system? Even if one shot worked, it takes at least 2 weeks for the vaccine to provide protection. It is the antibody preparation–immune globulin–that gives the baby the immediate protection needed. Not the shot. The CDC acknowledges that only 25% of babies develop a protective titer after the first dose of vaccine.[5]

There is virtually no benefit to that shot when the mother is negative. There is financial cost and potential but unmeasurable and unknown harm to a baby that has only just left the womb less than 12 hours before.

CDC estimates that less than 0.5% of all US births occur to Hepatitis B positive mothers. Of these, CDC notes that more than half of the mothers were born outside the USA, where rates of hepatitis B have always been much higher than in the US.[6] Many of the rest are iv substance abusers.

Let’s examine rates of newly reported chronic Hepatitis B infections in New Hampshire. New Hampshire had the lowest rate of the 44 states reporting.[7]

What about acute Hepatitis B cases? In 2022 there were 3 new acute Hepatitis B cases reported per million, and in 2021 there was 1 new case per million residents of New Hampshire.[8]

Finally, the testimony of Dr. Chan and nurse Heddy regarding children transmitting hepatitis B to each other in school and daycare is ridiculous. There are no reports of Hepatitis B outbreaks happening in schools or daycare in the United States, even before the hepatitis B vaccine was given to newborns.[9] Did they mix up Hepatitis A, which does transmit through the oral-fecal route, with Hepatitis B?

According to the University of Colorado, fewer than 20 US babies per year develop hepatitis B as neonates,[10] despite an estimated 18,000 mothers being hepatitis B positive.[11]

Despite a universal recommendation, only 73% of newborns receive the hepatitis B shot at birth in the US,[12] and very few other countries recommend a birth dose.

It should be noted that in New Hampshire, there is a law requiring testing of pregnant women, and in NH only 1% of birthing mothers are not being screened.

There is a very simple solution to this problem, which is to require that all hospitals, midwives and obstetricians review or obtain a Hepatitis B surface antigen test result for the mother of every newborn at the time of birth, as recommended by CDC,[13] or face a penalty.

If there is no test result, one can be readily obtained at the time of the birth. The test takes less than 5 minutes to perform[14] and usually costs under $50.[15] Then every newborn that needs the full treatment will receive it and every newborn that does not need treatment, won’t.

By simply amending the law requiring this test to add a financial penalty, the problem of inadequately treated newborns and overtreated newborns could be eliminated.