In a controversial move announced from the Oval Office on Monday, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order that mandates a rollback of recommended childhood vaccines and calls for splitting the combined mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into separate single-disease doses.
During his remarks, Trump repeated a long-debunked claim that the modern expanded childhood vaccine schedule has driven declining public health and rising autism rates in the United States. “Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today,” Trump argued. “In those times, people were much healthier and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.”
The Trump administration has a well-documented history of promoting the discredited conspiracy theory that the MMR vaccine is connected to autism diagnoses. Decades of peer-reviewed, large-scale scientific studies conducted by global public health institutions have consistently found no causal relationship between any childhood vaccine and autism.
Under the terms of the new order, the administration would set a new “gold standard” recommendation of only 11 core vaccines for the most high-risk infectious diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type B, pneumococcal disease, human papillomavirus, and varicella (chicken pox). Beyond cutting the total number of recommended vaccines, the order also proposes spreading remaining doses across multiple separate doctor visits, rather than combining doses during routine check-ups.
Critics have quickly pointed out a major legal barrier to the policy’s implementation: the U.S. federal government lacks the authority to set vaccine requirements for school attendance, a power that is exclusively reserved for individual U.S. states. Long-time vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been closely aligned with Trump on this issue, has been a prominent advocate for rolling back childhood vaccine recommendations in recent years. Public health experts warn that reduced vaccination rates and splits to combined vaccines like the MMR would increase the risk of deadly preventable disease outbreaks across the country.