At the stroke of a pen – along with his usual stream-of-consciousness prose – Donald Trump has wilfully ended decades during which the United States has been considered a paragon of excellence in the field of public health.
Past occupants of the Oval Office used their bully pulpit to encourage families to avail themselves of the best tools physicians have to safeguard and improve public health. But not Trump.
The US President flipped that on its head on Monday, using the powers of his office to sow fresh scepticism about vaccines and to undermine public health orthodoxy more broadly. Signing an executive order that bypasses Congress, he directed the Department of Health and Human Services, led by veteran vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, to cut the number of childhood jabs recommended by the federal government from 18 to 11, and to space out inoculations over a longer period of time.
From behind the Resolute Desk, Trump then ignited a potential public health nightmare that his successors could spend decades trying to reverse.
Engaging in arguably the most inflammatory litany of public health disinformation articulated by a US president, Trump told parents that “vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body”. He also insisted that he had personally witnessed “proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body”.
He claimed that “in many cases we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children”.
Trump’s comments seemed designed to stoke vaccine scepticism at a time when it is already at record levels. No explanation was offered by the White House. CNN reported that to attain anything like Trump’s figure, he would have to include voluntary annual shots for things like influenza and Covid-19.
Despite extensive global research debunking claims that vaccines cause autism, Trump again suggested that he believes there could be a link. He described the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine as possibly “quite lethal”.
The US government’s own Centres for Disease Control (CDC) – once considered the global gold standard in the realm of public health – describes the MMR shot as “safe and effective” and “the best way to prevent measles, mumps and rubella”. It also declares that when it comes to autism, “scientists in the United States and other countries have carefully studied the MMR vaccine. None have found a link”.
Trump said he wants Kennedy to split the MMR into three separate doses, a move that public health experts fear would mean fewer children receiving the full jabs, because of the added visits to doctor surgeries it would require.
Trump with US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. The President’s comments seemed designed to stoke vaccine scepticism at a time when it is already at record levels in the US (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)The CDC says that “no published scientific evidence shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots”.
Trump’s latest intervention comes weeks before the Pan American Health Organisation, part of the World Health Organisation, is poised to strip the US of its measles elimination status.
Measles has officially been eliminated in the United States since 2000, after a public health campaign that was launched in 1978 during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But since Trump’s return to office, the number of measles cases has soared. Nearly 2,500 cases have been reported since the start of this year, more than were recorded in the whole of 2025.
There have also been 38 separate outbreaks that physicians claim were fuelled by growing scepticism towards vaccines.
Today, the US National Institutes of Health says that social drivers, including “government/policy factors”, are creating soaring rates of “vaccine hesitancy” clustered in middle-to-high income areas and among mothers with college-level education or higher who preferred “social media narratives over physician-based vaccine information”.
Put more bluntly, the US government’s own health research suggests that Trump is partly to blame for persuading even highly educated parents to abandon vaccines, based on false narratives that are spreading like wildfire online.
Andrew Racine, the president of the American Academy of Paediatrics, has scoffed at Trump’s claim to be embracing “gold standard science”.
“There is no new evidence to justify significant changes to childhood immunisation guidance,” Racine told reporters. He also described Monday’s executive order as “not only disheartening but dangerous” and accused Trump and Kennedy of “spreading misleading claims… to scare families”.
But there is no way of putting the genie back in the bottle. The ink is now dry on Trump’s executive order, and it gives Kennedy fresh ammunition to begin his long-coveted personal assault on vaccines – with the almost inevitable increase in cases of measles and other illnesses that will now follow.
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