President Trump on Monday ordered the government to overhaul its approach toward childhood vaccines, reducing the number of immunizations recommended for children and spacing them out into multiple doctor’s visits.
The president signed an order recommending separating the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three different shots administered in separate visits and directed the nation’s health department to bolster vaccine research.
“We’re reducing them,” Mr. Trump said from the Oval Office. “It’s not only that you’re doing fewer vaccines or jabs, as they say, but you are doing them in a series of visits to the doctor.”
The MMR vaccines have been administered together since 1971.
Under Mr. Trump’s order, vaccines against 11 diseases – including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough – would be recommended for all children. Vaccines against other diseases such as hepatitis A and B and meningococcal disease would be recommended for high-risk groups or through shared decisions by parents and doctors.
Influenza and coronavirus vaccines would be included in the shared decision category.
The order calls for the changes to be implemented within 90 days through the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, a defunct panel the Trump administration revived last year.
In January, the Department of Health and Human Services attempted the same changes to the vaccine schedule, but a federal court blocked it.
Democrats said Mr. Trump’s order would upend years of proven science.
“This executive order lets political appointees attempt to overrule decades of peer-reviewed science and dictate vaccine schedules to American families,” said Rep. Frank Pallone, New Jersey Democrat. “Parents deserve accurate, trusted medical guidance, not a White House-curated list designed to rubber stamp Secretary Kennedy’s radical anti-vaccine agenda.”
The order calls for the changes to be implemented within 90 days through the Department of Health and Human Services’ Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, a defunct panel the Trump administration revived last year.
Task force members are charged with assessing “the ideal timing and sequencing of all core childhood vaccines,” and just the vaccination schedule “as appropriate,” according to the order.
The order also calls for the development of additional alternative adjuvants to aluminum. Adjuvants are ingredients added to vaccines that assist the body in producing an immune response to protect itself from disease.
Public health experts have questioned the science behind spacing out shots, saying it can lead to increased risk of children being infected with vaccine-preventable diseases before getting the remaining shots. Childhood vaccines have gone through thorough evaluations and safety tracking for decades, determining how the shots should be used.
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