President Donald Trump signed an executive order that significantly altered the federal guidance for childhood vaccines and call for states to reconsider their requirements for school, upending decades of public health practice.
The move is aimed at pleasing the conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine activists who embraced his political movement in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking Monday in the Oval Office, the president called the move an “ historic step in our mission to make America healthy again” before going on to regurgitate long-discredited theories about the non-existent link between vaccines and autism.
“My administration is recognizing gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases,” said Trump, who added that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine that has been used since 1971 would once again be broken up into three separate vaccines despite the lack of any such separate vaccines on the current market.
Citing no evidence, he alleged that the MMR vaccine — long a boogeyman of anti-vaccine activists thanks to a long-discredited study by a disgraced British ex-physician–is dangerous.
“So the MMR, we want to have separate, separate visits, separate times. The vaccine being broken into three separate single doses, and vaccines being administered in separate visits,” he said.
Trump also announced that vaccines for Covid-19, influenza and hepatitis B would no longer be recommended, despite warnings from health experts that not vaccinating against the liver disease could give rise to an epidemic of liver cancer in unvaccinated children infected with the virus.
“Parents can still choose to give their children all of the vaccinations if they wish. It's up to the parents. We're making recommendations that are strong, but it's up to the parents if they wish, and they will be covered by insurance,” he said.
“Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today. In those times, people were much healthier, and of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist. So, it is a reason for such epidemic rates of autism, and we're going to bring it back to much closer to where it was.”
There is no evidence linking vaccination rates to autism, yet Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have long pushed the theory that vaccines–particularly the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine–is liked to autism spectrum disorder.
This comes despite the fact that multiple studies have debunked the supposed link between childhood vaccinations and children developing autism spectrum disorder. Andrew Wakefield, the physician who published the original study, later had his medical license revoked and The Lancet, which published it, retracted the study.
The executive order, entitled “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” would divide childhood vaccinations into three distinct categories: immunizations recommended for all children such as the split-up MMR vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus and polio; vaccines for high-risk groups or populations, such as hepatitis A and hepatitis B vaccines; and vaccines based on shared clinical decision-making, such as the Covid-19 vaccine and the flu shot.
The order also advises states to review the recommendations and “consider updating relevant laws and regulations that define” immunization requirements.
Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, said that splitting up the MMR vaccine is a longstanding anti-vaccine talking point since Wakefield’s study.
“So even if autism is not mentioned, that's a pretty big clue that that's what's on his mind and the minds of people influencing him and writing the EO, probably including RFK Jr,” Gross told The Independent.
Trump has for years suggested that vaccines should be administered in smaller doses. But Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor emerita at Boston University and former president of the International Society for Autism Research, told The Independent that this could have massive consequences.
“It has huge consequences as you say, and it also has terrible consequences for the pediatricians who do their best to serve the public, they have such limited time with each family,” she told The Independent. “They're not going to be able to engage in the kinds of conversations that the president imagines is going to happen with shared responsibility for deciding whether to vaccinate or not. Pediatricians don't have the time for that.”
Trump has made looking into the increase in autism diagnoses a priority for his second administration. The president and Kennedy have suggested that autism is an “epidemic.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Kennedy’s stewardship published its biennial study last year suggesting that the increase in autism diagnoses came because of improved screening.
“Differences in the prevalence of children identified with ASD across communities might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices,” the 2025 report said.
