Trump recently signed an executive order calling for a reduction in the childhood vaccine schedule from the current 17 vaccines to 11. It also calls for breaking up the MMR (mumps, measles, and rubella) vaccine into individual vaccines. The administration is calling these “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a continuation of a trend we have been tracking in detail here since the beginning of Trump’s second term, and mostly led by his HHS secretary, RFK Jr., who is a longtime antivaxxer. Most recently, David has discussed reports that RFK Jr has attempted and continues to desire the complete dismantling of the vaccine schedule – the list of recommended routine childhood vaccines. He has been directing funding away from vaccine research in order to research vaccine injury. He is hunting for a link between vaccines and autism. And he is doing everything he can to marginalize vaccines as a public health measure.
The current executive order is simply an extension of this clear anti-vaccine campaign on the part of Trump and Kennedy. One silver lining is that the executive order is advice only – states determine which vaccines are required for children to enter public school. But still the intent is clear: to reduce vaccine uptake and to continue the watering down of the vaccine schedule.
Let’s look at some of the science behind the claims Trump and RFK are making. During the announcement, Trump said:
Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today,” Trump said. “In those times, people were much healthier and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.
Trump is clearly implying a cause-and-effect inference here. But he is also wrong on some of the basic facts. One claim is correct, the vaccine schedule has grown over time. This should not be surprising – as new safe and effective vaccines were developed, they were added to the schedule as appropriate. The claim that “people were healthier” decades ago is too vague to really assess. If measured by life expectancy, which is a good overall measure of health, the claim is flatly wrong. Life expectancy in the US has steadily climbed, took a short dip during COVID, and has now recovered to be higher (79 years in 2024) than any previous time.
You can also look at specific health factors, and we have a mixed bag. Infectious diseases are down, cancer survival is up, and the infant mortality rate is down. But obesity is up, along with the diseases for which this is a major risk factor, like diabetes. However, I don’t think we can blame vaccines for the obesity epidemic.
The notion that we were healthier in the past is simply a myth. It is therefore doubly ridiculous to blame this non-existent trend on vaccines, which make people healthier. Vaccines are the overwhelmingly most successful public health measure devised. The vaccines in the current schedule are all safe, effective, and necessary. The notion that Americans are getting too many vaccines is just antivaccine propaganda.
Trump also then raises the specter of vaccines as a cause for autism. This is a bit of propaganda that the anti-vaccine community will simply not let go of. The evidence base for this is massive, and reviews have found overwhelmingly that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism or thimerosal (a preservative used in some vaccines, but removed from the routine schedule in 2002) and autism.
The WHO has reviewed the global evidence and concluded:
New analysis from a WHO global expert committee on vaccine safety has found that, based on available evidence, no causal link exists between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The conclusion reaffirms WHO’s position that childhood vaccines do not cause autism.
In a recent interview, Kennedy dismissed this with a statement right out of anti-vaccine propaganda – that they have only studied “one vaccine and one ingredient”. This is misleading. First, as the WHO statement shows, there are also studies of trace aluminum in vaccines. But essentially the anti-vaccine movement pointed the finger at MMR, so it was researched and found to be untrue – no correlation. Then they pointed the finger at thimerosal, so it was researched, and no connection was found. They floated the idea of aluminum – again, researched with no connection found. And now they are saying – well, they have only tested these three things. You mean, the three things you claimed were connected to autism?
But also, the claim is still not true (it is what we straightforwardly call a lie). There are observational studies looking at the cumulative number of vaccines and autism, or any neurological outcome, showing no correlation. No matter how you slice it, there is simply no signal here, no correlation between any vaccine or ingredient, or cumulative dose of vaccines, or many doses at once, or anything related to vaccines and autism. There is simply nothing there. There is also zero reason to suspect a connection – the entire thing is a fantasy cooked up by the anti-vaccine movement.
And yet, under RFK, the CDC is now misleading the public about these basic facts. The CDC website states: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
This is nothing less than public health malpractice and blatant malfeasance. As I stated, the evidence, as reviewed by experts and organizations worldwide, shows no link. But of course RFK, who is a lawyer, not a scientist or medical expert, knows how to manipulate language to deceive. “Have not ruled out” is a squirrely phrase. Technically, nothing is “ruled out” in medical science, if you mean the risk is literally 0.000. That is not how medical science works. All we can ever say is that there is no detectable risk within the sensitivity of existing evidence. But when that evidence gets strong enough, we can treat it as “no significant risk”.
Further, something which RFK never gets, in medicine the game is not just risk but risk vs benefit. This is especially true in public health, which is almost by definition a numbers game. The benefits of vaccines are orders of magnitude greater than any risk, which is not the same as saying the risk is zero, but that is irrelevant.
Even the claim that the “high rates of autism” did not exist is highly misleading. What the evidence shows is that the increasing number of diagnoses is mostly due to increased surveillance, increased awareness, broadening of the definition, and diagnostic substitution. If, however, you do a direct comparison of cohorts over time, using the exact same methods of surveillance and diagnosis, the rate is essentially unchanged.
What we are seeing with the executive order is the intrusion of politics into science, the erosion of the independence of science and experts in informing public policy, and what happens when you make an anti-vaxxer president. Hopefully the executive order itself will have minimal direct impact, but that is not really the concern. The concern is that this is just one step of many that RFK and the Trump administration are doing to erode away vaccines as a public health measure in the US. They are building their case, they are calibrating their rhetoric, they are putting their pieces into play, and as David Gorski has said – they are definitely coming for your vaccines.
