Transcript: Scott Gottlieb on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Dec. 7, 2025
The following is the transcript of the interview with former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who now serves on the boards of Pfizer and United Healthcare, aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on December 7, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: For an overview of some recent changes in American public health policy. We are now joined by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He also serves on the boards of Pfizer and United Healthcare. Glad to see you again.
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Thank you.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You know, there was some pretty big news on Friday, and the American Academy of Pediatrics said it was deeply alarmed that the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, ACIP, voted 8-3 to change this 30-year-old policy regarding hepatitis B and newborns. They now recommend delaying the dose until the child is two months old, rather than within 24 hours of birth. What does this decision mean for families of newborns?
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Yeah. Well, look, I think we first need to understand why we’re giving this dose of vaccine at birth, because the idea of giving a vaccine to a newborn, to a lot of parents, seems uncomfortable, that the first thing a child will face when they’re born is going to be a vaccine within the first 24 hours. For a child over five years old, if they develop a hepatitis B infection, if they are exposed to it, they will have a 95% chance of clearing this infection and will develop lifelong immunity. For children aged one to five, they only have about a 25 to 50 percent chance of clearing the infection, so about 25 to 50 percent of children will develop a chronic infection, and about a quarter of them will die from hepatitis B if they are between one and five years old. Children are therefore more vulnerable to this virus and cannot clear the infection. But when we talk about a newborn, an infant, 90% of newborns who are infected, and they will be infected during delivery, will develop a chronic infection, they will not be able to eliminate hepatitis B, and around 25% of them will die from the after-effects of this infection, either from liver disease, cirrhosis or liver cancer. So we have this unique opportunity by giving this dose at birth and subsequent inoculations to virtually eliminate the risk that a newborn could contract hepatitis B and develop a chronic infection. It is almost 99% effective in preventing this chronic infection. And the chorus is.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And…
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: And one last point, the chorus is, oh, sorry, please.
MARGARET BRENNAN: No, no. And this decision is now to wait two months before giving this dose.
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: That’s right.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The president of the United States came out and said that’s fine, because hepatitis B is only transmitted sexually or through dirty needles.
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Yeah, look, that’s the problem. This is simply not true. The fact is, there’s a refrain that if you just test moms while they’re pregnant, you can detect if they have hepatitis B, and if they have hepatitis B, you continue to give them that dose at birth. But the reality is that many mothers don’t get tested, even if they intend to. Often, the results of these tests are not verified and the tests themselves have a false negative rate, meaning they will say you do not have hepatitis B when in fact you do, of about 2 percent. That may not seem like a lot, but that 2% will result in at least 1,000 babies being born and infected with hepatitis B. According to a modeling estimate, in the first year of these new guidelines, there will be 1,400 children, infants, who will contract hepatitis B, and again, 25% of them will die from this infection.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we’re looking at that because there’s currently a broader review of vaccines by the Trump administration and in this board decision, which the public could listen to. This was broadcast publicly. The board was chosen by RFK Jr, who is a vaccine skeptic here, among those who voted against the decision to delay. One you heard at the top of the show said the CDC was doing bad things. Another said: “No rational science has been presented, and the committee must accept responsibility when harm is caused.” These are pretty extraordinary statements. If the group that makes a decision with such serious consequences for the most vulnerable Americans does not base it on science, on any rational science, what does that say about what happens next?
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Well, look, it’s all about ACIP, except for a handful of members, who are anti-vax activists who were put there to carry out a specific agenda. And look, the secretary, to his credit, has been very honest about his intentions here. He’s the most prominent anti-vaccine in the country before he got into this position, and he said his goal was to eliminate childhood vaccinations, or many of these childhood vaccinations, and I think they’re going to take a methodical approach and gradually attack this problem. This is a serious unforced error in that the ACIP was an esteemed body that many states tie their own decision-making to, and what we are seeing right now is that as a group it is deteriorating and I don’t think it will ever be restored. I don’t think we can just push the button and restore a situation where people will respect his decisions again. There are approximately 600 state laws related to decisions made by ACIP. About 17 states have already passed new legislation declaring that they will no longer follow ACIP decisions. Insurers have said they will tie their own coverage decisions to professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and not the ACIP. So I think over time ACIP is going to be completely degraded as a decision-making body, and it will become more symbolic. There will be some states that will adhere to it, but it will be more symbolic.
MARGARET BRENNAN: This week we saw a big selloff in biotech stocks following these reports that the FDA, which you used to lead the first part of the Trump administration, is now going to require a study to get approval for vaccines. You were one of the former commissioners who published this truly extraordinary editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, saying that the FDA and the top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, were changing their policies in a way that was going to slow down the development of new and better vaccines. What exactly is the problem you see? Because it’s not just about hepatitis B, it’s about the vaccines of the future. Are you saying it just won’t be created?
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: That’s right. So Vinay Prasad, who is the head of the biology center. Also oversees the Vaccine Division. He was also named head of biostatistics, the agency’s chief medical officer and scientific director. So he occupies a lot of positions. Put out a memo saying they’re going to remove or move away from what they call immune bridging studies. These are studies that allow well-validated vaccines, like the flu vaccine, to demonstrate each year that the vaccine, the new vaccine, formulated against the circulating strain, can produce effective antibodies against that particular strain, and that could be the basis for approval, rather than requiring new outcome studies each year to prove that the vaccine actually reduces the incidence of influenza. For established vaccines, where we know that antibody production is a good correlate of immunity, this has been a long-standing practice. It’s, we’re doing it for the flu vaccine, we’re doing it in covid. Certainly, we do it for things like the pneumococcal vaccine, the pneumococcal disease vaccine, where we look at the serotypes circulating within the bacterial serotypes. This allows us to update vaccines as these viral and bacterial strains change and as strain composition changes over time to provide protection for the fall respiratory season. If they move away from that, as he said they’re considering doing, we simply won’t be able to update the vaccines every season, as we have historically, to adapt to whatever strain is circulating.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And 12 former FDA commissioners have said they are deeply concerned about what’s happening. This memo detailing the changes happening within the FDA from Dr. Prasad was obtained by CBS, and he claimed that career FDA staff were making changes in part because they discovered that at least 10 children had died after and because of receiving the Covid vaccine, called it a profound revelation, and said and asked: Did it kill more healthy children than it saved? The administration, to date, has not backed up any information to support these claims, but what questions do you have for the FDA commissioner, as they claim they are doing this to help people?
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Yeah, look, well, first of all, one thing doesn’t follow from the other. So the idea that if, in fact, they found cases where the Covid vaccine was linked to tragic deaths, it doesn’t follow that you make these policy changes. In fact, the policy changes would not address concerns related to the Covid vaccine itself. These are: Each case must be carefully considered. It is tragic to see a suspected case that could be linked to a vaccine. And these have been reviewed before by the FDA, and I don’t believe the new FDA has had access to analysis of the case level data, the individual cases that are filed with the agency when there is a death in proximity to vaccination, and some of them are filed by the manufacturers themselves are very subjective and require the goodwill of the people involved. And so I think they should make that analysis public so that it can be reviewed and people can be reassured that they’ve already moved away from the 10 endpoint reports and now they’re saying it’s eight or nine, so they’re already moving away from that.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay. And HHS has said it will eventually make this data public. We’ll look for it when it comes out. Dr. Gottlieb, thank you for your analysis today. We’ll come back in a moment.
