The IAPCOI’s guidelines are primarily for pediatricians in their office practice. The stress is more on providing the best practice guidelines for an individual child overlooking the programmatic and logistics considerations. Hence, these guidelines are offering the best ways of utilizing the most optimum response of an individual vaccine for an individual person. IAPCOI is also issuing guidelines for mass or public use of a vaccine in form of recommendations to Government of India including its position on incorporation of new vaccines in the national immunization schedule [1]. Let us not confuse the two recommendations. 　 　

As far as Hepatitis-B recommendations are concerned, we have offered the best ‘feasible’ individual schedule that can be incorporated in to current IAP’s immunization timetable. Nowhere have we stated that hepatitis-B vaccine should not be administered after 24 hours of birth but the recommendations have stated clearly that it should be offered to all newborns before hospital discharge (see comments of Table 1and footnote on Hepatitis-B of Figure 1). Similarly, though the committee stresses the need and significance of birth dose, it has not out-rightly rejected the other schedules including the government’s adopted 6-10-14 weeks, considering the programmatic implications and logistic issues. When a vaccine is used in a program, there are many other considerations apart from vaccine efficacy and effectiveness like vaccine cost, burden of that particular vaccine preventable disease, logistics, vaccine safety, public acceptance, etc. These issues may be inconsequential when a vaccine is used in office practice for protection of an individual subject. In the former, one may be forced to compromise on certain attributes of a vaccine, but there may be no such compulsions in the latter.