Baruch Samuel Blumberg, M.D., Ph.D., led the team of American scientists who discovered the hepatitis B virus in 1965, then developed the first screening test and the first vaccine to protect against infection. In 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery while working at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
He was also my maternal grandfather, my first mentor, and my role model. Now, as recommendations around the hepatitis B vaccine change, his legacy is under threat — and people will die as a result.
The hepatitis B virus causes more than a million deaths worldwide each year from end-stage liver failure, cirrhosis, and liver cancer. But where the vaccine is readily available, the rates of new infections have plummeted, most dramatically among infants and young children.
The bicentennial year 1976 was great for American science, with U.S. researchers sweeping the board with Nobels in every category. It was also a generous era in science: Grandpa publicly released the patent necessary for reproducing the hepatitis B vaccine, choosing public good over personal enrichment, to enable cheaper production by any pharmaceutical company and therefore rapid rollout globally. In this he followed in the footsteps of another great American hero, Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine.
I graduated in 2021 from the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, on the 70th anniversary of Grandpa’s graduation from the same medical school, where he had studied after serving in the U.S. Navy. I graduated mere months after the rollout of the Covid vaccine, into the baptism by fire of an internal medicine residency in Philadelphia. I witnessed people dying in indescribable, avoidable suffering. Moments from intubation, gasping for breath, these patients still rejected the idea of the Covid vaccine with the rage that comes from fear.
And that fear is spreading.
Vaccinating newborns against hepatitis B within the first 24 hours of life is vital. As a bloodborne infection, it is most commonly transmitted through blood exchange between an infected mother (who is often unaware that she has it) and infant during delivery. But it can also be transmitted through incidental contact at home and in communal spaces.
The vaccine is made up of a tiny, noninfectious piece of virus protein that effectively teaches the immune system to recognize and eliminate an infection before it takes root.
Without vaccination, if infected, a newborn has a greater than 90% risk of developing a chronic hepatitis B infection, which can lead to premature death from progressive liver diseases such as cirrhosis and liver cancer. Chronic hepatitis B can be managed with lifelong medications, but it cannot be cured. Because of a decision made decades before by frightened parents, these babies may grow up to suffer the misery of cancer — and, always, the risk of passing the curse of illness to future generations.
Vaccines are not without risks. No medication is. No food, for that matter, is without risk. No form of transportation, no job, no choice of companion.
But choosing avoidance does not avoid risk; inaction has terrible risks of its own. And, time and again, despite years of biased and malicious attempts to put forward contradicting “research,” it is proven fact that the greater risk to your life, your children’s lives, your fellow citizens, lies in avoiding vaccination.
Vaccination saves more than the life of the vaccinated. It is an act by an individual against the insidious spread of disease. It is an act of love to add a shield to the wall protecting the community. It is the means through which you, as an American, can know with certainty that you have saved American lives. Anti-science propaganda at the highest levels in this country is designed to rob us of this privilege, rob us of the opportunity to participate in our civic duty to one another. This rhetoric smears some of the proudest moments in U.S. history and insults the memories of its heroes. Where is the patriotism in sneering at America’s great achievements?
When I speak with my patients, delving into their lives through the context of their illness, I think of the ideals that my grandfather embodied. There wasn’t a person alive Grandpa didn’t find interesting, his engagement so unmistakably genuine that he was able to form almost immediate connections with complete strangers. Human connection is the initial trigger that activates trust. Grandpa’s early research necessitated the retrieval of blood samples from genetically unique populations all over the world. He worked with medical missions, China’s “barefoot doctors,” and other scientists in the field. He traveled to remote communities by dugout canoe, with bush pilots, in jeeps, and on foot. He arrived with antibiotics, clean bandages, and every available vaccine he could carry.
In exchange, people who so often had suffered in their interactions with outsiders trusted him with their blood. I can only hope to earn those relationships with my patients in a time when, possibly more than ever before, they are primed to mistrust the medical system.
Grandpa’s faith in the United States was unshakeable. He never advocated blind belief — he’d tell me “be a skeptic, but never be a cynic” — but he understood that faith in his fellow Americans, in the covenant between us that forms the nation, could exist alongside our country’s flaws.
So many aspects of American life might have been unrecognizable to him and his contemporaries now, but I cannot believe that he would have lost faith in our drive to protect our loved ones and our community.
Emilie G.C. Thompson is a hematology–oncology fellow physician practicing in Baltimore.
