Trump’s new orders on child vaccines are even more dangerous than they seemed at first
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- Trump’s anti-vaccine orders will encourage vaccine refusals, placing millions of children at risk
No one can claim to have been surprised by the executive order President Trump issued Monday calling for a radical transformation of childhood vaccination practices in the U.S.
After all, Trump has been beating the anti-vaccination drum for years. His secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an established anti-vaccine activist.
Trump himself has been an almost limitless fount of misinformation and disinformation about medicine, promoting useless nostrums against COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine, pondering whether ingesting bleach would kill the virus and questioning whether expectant mothers should take Tylenol.
I’ve seen proof where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen.
— President Trump fabricates a yarn about childhood vaccinations
Monday’s executive order marks a new phase in his battle against public health.
The order is tantamount to a one-stop shop offering all the common anti-vaccine tropes claiming that America’s children have been overwhelmed by excessive immunizations — a multivalent injection of fact-free claptrap, if you wish.
The tsunami of fabricated claims in the order and voiced by Trump and others at the Oval Office announcement Monday is almost overwhelming.
If there’s a saving grace in this episode, it’s that most states and the vast majority of parents are likely to ignore Trump’s order. But the order will leave its mark by magnifying the confusion many parents already face in making decisions about their children’s immunizations. That’s a public health threat all on its own.
Here’s a look at Monday’s order, which claims to “deliver gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations.”
The conservative war on child health starts with the anti-vaccine campaign and proceeds to cutbacks in nutrition assistance and narrowed access to healthcare.
First, the order pares the list of recommended immunizations to 11 diseases from 17. Six immunizations — for hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, flu and COVID-19 — are knocked down from “recommended” to “shared clinical decision-making.” That’s code for expanding the opportunity for parents to refuse the shots for their children.
Trump calls for supplanting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine by individual vaccines for each disease, administered at separate physician visits.
He calls on the Department of Justice to pursue cases against states and localities whose immunization rules contradict “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law, including their obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”
He revived the canard about vaccines contributing to a rise in autism, despite the connection having been thoroughly refuted by years of clinical research.
Trump also called on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under whose imprimatur federal vaccine recommendations are issued, to revise its recommendations to match those of other “peer, developed countries.”
That last item points to Trump’s disregard for the niceties of government procedure. In effect, he has presented his newly installed director of the CDC, Erica Schwartz, with a heaping, steaming platter of policy manure. Schwartz only won Senate confirmation on Wednesday, after a hearing in which she pledged to “never betray the science” on which CDC policies are based. This is her first test.
Schwartz hasn’t commented on the Trump order as of this writing. I asked the CDC for her view on the executive order, but received no reply.
Trump unveiled his executive order at an Oval Office ceremony at which no licensed physician was in attendance. Trump himself issued mouthfuls of balderdash during the event. “I’ve seen proof,” he said, “where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen.”
RFK Jr.’s attacks on vaccines go beyond changing the childhood immunization schedule. Now he’s taking aim at vaccine R&D itself.
Let’s be crystal clear: There’s no such thing. To quote infectious disease expert Jake Scott of Stanford Medicine, “every vaccine given at a baby’s two-month visit adds up to about half a teaspoon. A 20-ounce soda bottle is more than 200 times that.”
At Monday’s announcement, Trump called the MMR vaccine “quite lethal.” Asked by a reporter what evidence he had for that, he replied, “What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way.”
Trump’s order cites no scientific research to justify splitting multivalent vaccines such as the MMR into individual parts, even though it’s obvious that doing so and requiring multiple doctor visits will raise the cost and time-wastage for many households and despite research showing that the bundled vaccines don’t present a health threat to children and work as expected.
I asked the White House for the scientific grounds for splitting up the vaccine. “President Trump is one of countless parents who have voiced questions and concerns about the combined MMR vaccine,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “The Administration’s push to develop separate vaccinations for all three diseases ... ultimately will increase vaccination rates for all three diseases.”
In fact, experts generally hold that splitting the shots will decrease vaccination rates for all three diseases by erecting an unnecessary obstacle to the shots. That was Japan’s experience when it split off mumps from the MMR vaccine and ended up with a higher incidence of mumps than before.
As it happens, almost nothing Trump called for is practical or possible today. Monovalent childhood vaccines aren’t available in the U.S., or in most other developed countries.
Changing its web page, the CDC now promotes the myth that vaccines are linked to autism despite years of research refuting the claim.
Physicians oppose a return to monovalent vaccines because that would “unnecessarily delay administration of the three vaccine components, leaving children susceptible for a longer period of time to serious, life-threatening diseases,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Use of monovalent vaccines also would increase the number of injections a child would need and increase the number of visits required to complete the vaccination series.”
In other words, the bundled vaccines are better for children’s health.
Developing separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines and bringing them to market could take a decade of R&D including clinical trials. Drugmakers aren’t likely to embark on the process now, knowing that a new administration will take office Jan. 20, 2029, and — assuming it hews to accepted science — likely as not will reverse these recommendations.
Also, vaccine policy is firmly in the hands of the states. None are mandated to follow federal standards. To date, almost all states have maintained their previous mandates or otherwise decoupled their policies from the federal recommendations. According to the healthcare information site KFF, by Jan. 20 this year, 28 states and the District of Columbia — including all states with Democratic governors — had announced that they wouldn’t follow the federal government.
In Florida, a red state, the anti-vax surgeon general Joseph Ladapo — whom I earlier labeled “the most dangerous quack in America” — has recommended ending all childhood vaccine mandates. But Florida lawmakers haven’t gone along, and the mandates are still in place.
Trump’s latest order is an attempted end run around a federal judge’s ruling in March that blocked Kennedy’s attempt to cut the vaccine schedule to 11 immunizations. Trump followed that ruling with the executive order citing peer countries May 29.
RFK Jr. turned the CDC’s vaccine committee into an anti-vaccine panel, but it still heard evidence that his campaign against vaccinating pregnant women was a huge mistake.
Vaccine specialists find Trump’s citing “peer nations” to be “nonsensical,” to quote Paul Offit, one of the nation’s leading vaccinologists, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. When if comes to child immunizations, Offit has observed, there are no “peers” to emulate: “Different developed world countries make different decisions based on demographics, health system capacity, vaccine access, and vaccine cost,” Offit notes.
For example, Denmark, which Kennedy has held up as a model, doesn’t pay for the rotavirus vaccine, “which prevents a virus that causes vomiting, diarrhea, and severe dehydration,” Offit says. But it has been recommended in the U.S. since 2006, eliminating as many as 70,000 hospitalizations every year.
“Denmark should mimic the U.S., not the other way around,” Offit says.
The bottom line is that childhood immunizations save lives. The advent of the measles vaccine reduced the incidence of that disease in the U.S. from an average of 530,000 cases per year to fewer than 50. Cases of whooping cough, polio, smallpox, rubella and diphtheria fell by 99-100% after vaccinations for each became standard.
Trump and Kennedy want to return us to those bad old days by refashioning them fictitiously as the good old days. They would expose millions of children to severe disease and death, which that could be averted by the science at hand. It’s a terrifying turn in American medical policy. In heaven’s name, why would they want to do it?
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article contends that President Trump’s new executive order on childhood vaccines represents a radical and dangerous break from decades of science‑based public health policy, describing it as the latest step in an administration campaign to sharply reduce and reconfigure the routine immunization schedule for children.[2][4][5][10][13][15][20]
Building on earlier efforts led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the piece argues that the order’s shift from recommending protection against 17–18 diseases to only 11 for all children is not grounded in credible evidence and instead reflects long‑standing anti‑vaccine rhetoric within the administration.[2][3][4][5][15][16][18][20]
The article stresses that reclassifying key vaccines – including those against hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, influenza, Covid‑19 and certain meningococcal infections – from “recommended for all children” to “shared clinical decision‑making” or “high‑risk only” will in practice make it easier for parents to skip them, thereby lowering coverage and increasing the risk of serious, preventable illness.[1][3][5][9][10][16][18][20]
In addition, the piece underscores that Trump and his allies have revived the thoroughly debunked claim that childhood vaccines contribute to autism, noting that major news organizations and health authorities emphasize that decades of studies have found no causal link between vaccines and autism.[4][5][7][10][14][15]
The article criticizes Trump’s demand to split the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three separate shots given at different visits, arguing that this proposal runs counter to broad scientific consensus that combination vaccines are safe, efficient and protective, and that spacing shots out over multiple appointments will delay immunity and create more opportunities for children to miss doses altogether.[3][5][9][10][14][15][20]
Beyond the MMR change, the piece highlights that the order calls for most childhood vaccines to be administered at separate medical visits, and it relays experts’ warnings reported elsewhere that such spacing can increase the chance children will be exposed to vaccine‑preventable diseases before completing the series, while also adding costs and logistical burdens for families.[9][14][15][20]
The article further argues that Trump’s invocation of “peer, developed countries” as models for U.S. vaccine policy is misleading, pointing to reporting that the executive order is based on a comparative HHS assessment rather than the usual transparent, scientist‑led advisory process, and to critics who say cross‑national vaccine schedules reflect different health systems, demographics and cost structures rather than a single “gold standard”.[3][15][18][20][21]
The piece notes that Trump’s order directs the Justice Department to pursue legal challenges against states whose school vaccination requirements do not permit broad religious and medical exemptions, and it characterizes this as an aggressive, top‑down attempt to weaken state‑level mandates that have historically helped maintain high immunization rates.[2][3][4][7][9][10][14][13][20]
While acknowledging that school vaccine rules are set by individual states and that experts expect immediate practical effects on families to be limited, the article warns that the order will still sow confusion among parents and undermine confidence in established guidance, a concern echoed by medical organizations that describe the directive as a “reckless intervention” that could erode trust in vaccines.[9][13][14][19][20]
Ultimately, the piece suggests that by narrowing universal recommendations, promoting unproven changes to vaccine formulation and timing, and amplifying discredited safety fears, the Trump administration is steering U.S. policy toward a future in which more children are vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases that had been dramatically reduced by routine immunization.[4][5][9][10][14][15][16][18][20]
Different views on the topic
Supporters of the executive order emphasize that its central goal is to “maximize parental choices” over childhood vaccination, arguing that dividing shots into three categories – universally recommended, recommended for high‑risk groups, and subject to shared clinical decision‑making – gives families more information and flexibility to tailor decisions to their children’s circumstances.[1][3][5][9][14][15][16][18]
The White House fact sheet and Trump’s public remarks frame the revised schedule as delivering “gold standard” childhood vaccine recommendations, contending that concentrating mandatory protection on 11 core diseases will still safeguard children from the most serious illnesses while avoiding what the administration portrays as over‑immunization.[1][2][4][5][10][11][15]
In advancing the order, the administration repeatedly cites “peer, developed countries” and specific examples such as Denmark, arguing that many wealthy nations recommend fewer routine pediatric vaccines and that aligning U.S. guidance with those practices will bring American policy in line with what Trump describes as international best standards.[2][3][8][15][16][18][21]
The order and accompanying statements further argue that some vaccines – including those for respiratory syncytial virus, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, dengue, influenza, Covid‑19 and rotavirus – are most crucial for children at higher risk, and that focusing strong recommendations on those populations while using shared clinical decision‑making for others better reflects a nuanced assessment of benefits and risks.[1][3][5][10][16][18][20]
Trump and Kennedy have long asserted that infants and young children receive too many shots too quickly, and the executive order reflects that concern by urging that vaccines be given over more visits and by calling for the combined MMR vaccine to be split into separate measles, mumps and rubella shots; the administration contends that spreading out doses and allowing parents to choose timing will make vaccination feel safer and more acceptable to hesitant families.[1][3][4][5][7][10][11][14][15][16][18]
In addition, administration materials describe the directive as a way to strengthen research and safety monitoring, directing the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to continuously evaluate vaccine risk‑benefit profiles, explore alternatives to ingredients such as aluminum and ensure that parents have access to what the order portrays as the best scientific information from both U.S. and international data.[1][3][6][12][16][18][21]
The order explicitly invokes constitutional principles related to parental authority, religious liberty, disability accommodations and equal protection, and supporters argue that directing the Justice Department to challenge state laws viewed as too restrictive on exemptions is necessary to protect families’ rights not to follow vaccine requirements they believe conflict with their beliefs or their interpretation of their children’s medical needs.[1][3][4][7][9][10][11][14]
Finally, Trump’s comments at the signing ceremony and earlier public statements reflect a belief, shared by some vaccine‑skeptical advocates, that rising autism diagnoses and worries about side effects warrant a fundamental rethinking of the childhood vaccine schedule, and the executive order is presented by those backers as a corrective that responds to long‑standing parental concerns about safety and timing, even as scientific and medical organizations strongly dispute those claims.[4][5][7][10][14][15][16][17][20]
