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President Donald J. Trump signs an executive order concerning childhood vaccines as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jayme Franklin and Dr. Heidi Overton look on in the Oval Office at the White House, 10 August 10. Image courtesy of the White House.
ColumnSCEPTICS IN CHARGE
Stars and Swipes Trump's vaccine makeover is a recipe for disaster
With Robert F. Kennedy Jr by his side, Trump is putting politics and junk science ahead of decades of clinical evidence on childhood vaccines, in a messy attempt to appeal to his base.
IT WAS ARGUABLY one of the most surreal scenes ever broadcast from the Oval Office – and there’s plenty of competition for that accolade. Trump, catatonic, slumped to one side with his eyes closed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, standing to his left, reading incomprehensible gibberish from a sheaf of papers, hands trembling and body twitching.
On Trump’s right side, an unidentified female, expressionless and motionless, except for some bizarre arm movements; more malfunctioning humanoid flight attendant than actual human.
Hardly a trio that would inspire confidence in their collective understanding of epidemiology. Frankenstein’s monster would have made for a more compelling advocate for Trump’s “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations.”
Trump’s vaccine makeover, launched atop a fire hose of lies and falsehoods about the dangers of the current schedule, ran the gamut from the bewildering to the demented. Aside from baseless attempts to link vaccines to autism, it included hair-raising claims of children being subjected to 72 individual injections, with each shot pumping more than half a litre of vaccine into their arms.
Even more implausible was Trump’s claim that he personally took each of his five children for five separate doctor’s visits so that they could each receive bite-sized, monovalent doses of the MMR vaccines.
The executive order directs MMR vaccine manufacturers of MMR to start producing single vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, which would be administered separately, instead of the current multivalent format and removes Hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, flu and Covid-19 from the recommended list of 18 vaccines.
It demands that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revise its recommendations accordingly, presenting Erica Schwarz, its newly appointed director, with the sort of dilemma she could do without in her first week on the job. Schwarz was confirmed by the Senate last week on foot of her promise to ‘never betray the science’ on which CDC policies are based. Good luck with that.
And it directs Todd Blanche, the confirmed-by-the-skin-of-teeth Attorney General, to “pursue cases against states…. whose immunisation rules contradict “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” By which Trump means New York and California.
Given Blanche’s record thus far, strong-arming blue states on spurious grounds is unlikely to cost him much sleep. But luckily for Schwarz, the order appears to be legally, practically and logistically unenforceable.
Ripples throughout healthcare
Merck, the pharmaceutical giant that manufactures the M-M-R II vaccine in the US, estimates that complying with Trump’s Executive Order would cost $500 million (€433.09 million) and take until 2036. At which point the MMR vaccine is unlikely to be uppermost on Trump’s mind, assuming he’s still alive and has a functioning cerebral cortex.
Meanwhile, the chaps in the C-suites at Merck must be second-guessing the $1 million (€866,000) donation they made to Trump’s second presidential inauguration committee – not to mention the $12 million (€10.39 million) shelled out on lobbyists over the past 15 months.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy can find a single paediatrician or epidemiologist who will publicly support this initiative. Nor can they find a single credible study or scientist that would support their claims that childhood vaccines cause autism.
Stanford University’s database, which contains 378 trials involving more than six million children, found no link between vaccines and autism. A 2025 retrospective cohort of 2.5 million US children found no association between MMR vaccines and an increased risk of autism.
There is, however, evidence of the tangible benefits stemming from the current childhood vaccine schedule. In 1994, the Clinton administration introduced a federal programme that covered the cost of vaccines for children of low-income families. A CDC report published in August 2024 concluded: “Among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalisations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion (€2.34 trillion).”
Donald and Robert
Yet two elderly men, with no medical qualifications and an inability to distinguish between correlation and causation, appear hell-bent on derailing a system that has yielded tangible health benefits and fiscal returns.
Given Trump’s past hypothesising about ingesting bleach and inserting ultraviolet lights into bodily orifices to cure Covid, it’s safe to assume that the majority of American parents will file his latest missive in the same drawer as his half-baked theories about windmills and mad whales and disrupting hurricanes with nuclear bombs.
The latest YouGov/Economist poll indicates that six in 10 Americans perceive Trump as ‘not honest or trustworthy.’ But that leaves 40% who are to some degree receptive to his outlandish claims, particularly where they reinforce their own beliefs.
Trump knows that with enough repetition, a falsehood will eventually be accepted as truth. And Kennedy’s mangled facts and outlandish claims have delivered their own cult following, largely comprised of parents of ASD children whose quest to find a cause makes them vulnerable to his junk science. According to the CDC, around one million children in the United States – one in 31 children – have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The CDC and the advocacy group Autism Speaks estimate that 5.4 million adults are on the autism spectrum.
The influence of the US anti-vaccine movement continues to grow, and the US overall vaccine rate of 84% – a drop of 5% in four years – is well below the 95% the WHO recommends for establishing herd immunity. The redder the state, the easier it is to obtain exemptions on religious, philosophical or medical grounds and the higher the exemption rate. And the higher the child mortality rate.
While there’s no evidence to support Trump’s claims of links between vaccines and autism, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests the most pro-Trump states in the US have the lowest vaccine uptake rates and the highest levels of preventable deaths from childhood illnesses.
Disease prevalence
CDC and state statistics reveal the cost of the anti-vaccine movement, coupled with the shuttering of children’s clinics and slashing of CHIPs (Children’s Health Insurance Programs) in red states. Mississippi has a child mortality rate of 51.6 per 100,000, more than three times Massachusetts’s child mortality rate of 16.7 per 100,000. Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana have more than twice as many preventable child deaths as California, Connecticut or New York. The overall child mortality rate for children aged 0 to 19 in Alabama is 81 per 100,000 compared with 29 per 100,000 for California.
Idaho is a sobering example of what happens when state legislators gut children’s healthcare while making child vaccines entirely discretionary. The state has more religious sects, fewer paediatricians, and the lowest childhood vaccine uptake of any of state in the US. State laws shield parents from criminal prosecution if they opt for prayer rather than medical treatment for a sick child.
The net result is that just 64% of its children are vaccinated, and the rate of treatable and preventable deaths amongst children whose parents are members of faith-based sects is four times higher than the national average.
Kennedy’s antipathy to science has already prompted him to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development funding. His peddling of disproven links between vaccines and autism hasn’t just fed his highly developed Messiah complex and served as a springboard for his Make America Healthy Again quackery. It has proven personally lucrative.
Prior to his confirmation as Health Secretary, he disclosed $11.3 million (€9.79 million) in earnings. A sizeable chunk came from Children’s Health Defence, an anti-vaccination advocacy and litigation organisation he founded; the remainder came mostly from books, speaking tours and licensing Make America Healthy Again merchandise.
It’s worth asking why Trump has persisted with this issue, given there’s virtually no chance it will survive contact with a courtroom. Is it a red herring? A ruse to distract from the war in Iran and the humiliating tsunami of memes featuring Trump cowering in a catering truck? More likely, it’s a sop to the MAHA and MAGA loyalists, a sort of consolation prize from a president who promised to no foreign wars and a golden age of prosperity but has spectacularly failed to deliver either one.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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