The vaccine advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet Dec. 4 and 5. On the agenda: the hepatitis B vaccine, the overall childhood vaccine schedule and specific vaccine ingredients.

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control Prevention will scrutinize the childhood vaccine schedule and may start to upend it.

A group of local health leaders from across the country said they're worried about how an upcoming meeting could affect immunization access and rates. The meeting could mean changes to more federal vaccine recommendations for serious viruses — like hepatitis B.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first recommended vaccinating all babies against hepatitis B at birth in 1991. Since then, chronic hepatitis B infections in children and adolescents have fallen by 99%.