Hepatitis B vaccine proven safe after decades of use

"Vaccine for hepatitis B is a silent killer of humans," says the thumbnail of a Facebook video shared on October 28.

It has been viewed over 87,000 times since it was posted on a page called "R&D Center by ST.Luke's College".

The header photo of the page shares an image taken from the website of the St. Luke's Medical Center College of Medicine -- but which had been altered to make it appear doctors from the Manila-based medical school had endorsed a milk product called "Fohepta" (archived link).

"It helps totally remove diseases like fatty liver, hepatitis, cirrhosis," the post goes on to say. "Just use Fohepta, effective after seven days."

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Screenshot of the false post, taken November 7, 2023

Hepatitis B is a vaccine-preventable viral infection. For some people, it causes a short-term illness but for others can become a chronic infection that leads to life-threatening issues in the liver (archived link).

The younger a person is when infected with the hepatitis B virus, the greater the chance of developing chronic infection. Vaccination of newborn infants for hepatitis B has been mandatory in the Philippines since 1994 (archived link).

Similar false posts claiming that the hepatitis B vaccine is dangerous have also been shared on Facebook here and here.

Safe vaccine

But the safety profile of the hepatitis B vaccine has been proven with decades of data, Dr. Angela Salvaña, a liver disease specialist and a clinical associate professor at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, told AFP on November 8.

"The vaccine has been around for more than three decades. If there were safety signals, they would certainly have come out," Salvaña said.

Multiple studies conducted since the 1990s have repeatedly shown no serious health concerns linked to hepatitis B vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (archived link).

This includes the largest case series review of hepatitis B vaccination reports among newborns born between November 1, 1991 and April 30, 1994 which found no safety issues with the jabs (archived link).

More recently, a CDC review of reports of adverse events following hepatitis B vaccination from 2005 through 2015 found the most frequently reported adverse events were fever, injection site redness and vomiting.

The review did not detect any new or unexpected safety concerns (archived link).

Baseless health claims

Moreover, doctors say claims that a milk product can treat serious liver diseases are baseless.

"There is no medication/milk/supplement that has been proven in therapeutic scientific trials to cure the diverse liver conditions as claimed by Fohepta," Dr. Edhel Tripon, a liver disease specialist from the The Medical City hospital in the Philippines, told AFP on November 7.

She said the diseases are "too complex and diverse to be cured by a single milk formula".

Dr. Salvaña additionally said serious cases of cirrhosis -- a condition in which the liver is scarred -- cannot be treated with a milk product.

"Even our newest medication are not capable of reversing late cirrhosis. Certainly any reverse of that does not happen in seven days."

A representative for St. Luke's Medical Center College of Medicine said the school does not have an "R&D Center".

"We have the Office of Research and Scholarly Works which oversees the research activities of our students and faculty," the representative told AFP on November 17.

"The research done is definitely not towards the creation of marketable products nor the endorsement of any products."

Multiple keyword searches on the registered products database of the Philippine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yielded no results for "Fohepta" as of November 14, 2023.

The FDA earlier in March warned the public against consuming the product, saying it has not been evaluated for safety.

Philippine social media is awash with misinformation about untested products and quick-fix treatments for chronic illnesses.

AFP has debunked the most viral posts here, here, here, here and here.