The executive order establishes “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” and directs federal agencies and states to advance them. The new recommendations attempt to repeat prior administration changes to the routine vaccine schedule through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reducing the number of diseases targeted from 17 to 11. At the time, we explained that HHS had justified this decision with a variety of incorrect or misleading assertions. A judge subsequently blocked these changes after the American Academy of Pediatrics sued HHS.
During the Aug. 10 signing, Trump repeated claims about the childhood vaccine schedule and autism that he has made in the past, often bolstered by comments from Kennedy.
- Trump misleadingly claimed that the changes to the vaccine schedule align the U.S. with peer nations. When counting diseases the schedule protects against, the changes would put the U.S. at the low end of peer nations in the size of its vaccine schedule, exceeding only Denmark.
- The president falsely claimed that the U.S. requires “72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.” States require certain vaccinations to attend school, but none come close to mandating 72 doses. And there are no federal vaccine mandates.
- Trump said children don’t need to be vaccinated against hepatitis B until adolescence. That ignores what medical experts say are good reasons to vaccinate every newborn at birth.
- He falsely claimed that children and infants are being injected with massive volumes of fluid during routine immunizations, referring at one point to “vats of vaccine.” Doses of childhood vaccines are generally about a tenth of a teaspoon, and there’s no evidence that the size or number of doses under the current vaccination schedule is harmful.
- Trump baselessly suggested rising rates of autism are connected to the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule over time. A number of studies have found no connection between vaccines and autism, and the contention that there has been a massive rise in autism is also faulty.
It’s unclear what the practical results of the executive order will be. “It should not be valid legally, and CDC should not be changing its immunization schedule table,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a Substack post.
The new order additionally recommends splitting combination vaccines into separate doses administered at separate medical visits. In another article, we wrote about Trump’s false claims about the combination measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.
