President Donald Trump on Monday issued an executive order that aims to reduce the number of universally recommended vaccines for children — a move that reaffirms the dramatic overhaul Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced earlier this year that has been blocked in the courts.
Similar to that vaccine schedule change, the new order recommends that the list of diseases that all children should be vaccinated against drop from 18 to 11, according to a fact sheet obtained by NBC News. The other shots would be subject to so-called shared clinical decision-making between a parent and their child’s doctor.
The proposed changes, in theory, do not prohibit access to childhood vaccines — rather, Kennedy said Monday that they are meant to give parents choices. The recommended childhood immunization schedule in the U.S. has never been mandatory.
In his announcement, Trump drew a link between the vaccine changes the order recommends and concerns about rising rates of autism in the U.S., despite decades of research showing there is no link between autism and vaccines.
“While we do not know exactly what the cause is with respect to autism, it is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world, so we’re reducing them,” Trump said.
Heidi Overton, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, said during the announcement on Monday that because Kennedy’s prior vaccine overhaul is held up in court, Trump is “correcting that wrong” with his executive order.
The order also recommends that all childhood immunizations be administered at separate medical visits, and that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine be separated into three separate shots, given individually, according to the fact sheet. No such individual vaccines are currently FDA-approved or available.
The combined MMR vaccine — recommended for children at 12 to 15 months and 4 to 6 years — has been available since 1971, in part to reduce the number of injections that children receive. Breaking up the shots would mean children would receive six injections instead of two.
The order builds on an earlier one aimed at aligning the childhood vaccine recommendations in the U.S. with those of peer, developed countries.
Some current and former Trump administration officials have pointed to Denmark as an example, where vaccines for the flu, Covid, RSV, chickenpox and several others aren’t included in the universal childhood schedule. However, many public health experts say the burden of infectious diseases is different in the U.S. given the size and diversity of its population. Denmark also has a universal healthcare system, while the U.S. does not.
