It also directs the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to sue states that fail to provide religious and medical exemptions for mandated vaccines and orders the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot—a combination vaccine that has been in use for more than 50 years—to be split into three separate jabs. “Today we’re proud to officially announce the United States of America’s gold-standard childhood vaccination recommendations,” Trump said during the signing ceremony.
But will the executive order actually change what vaccines are available to children? Probably not, legal scholars and medical experts say.
The executive order calls for a significant overhaul of the federal childhood immunization schedule—the timeline of recommended vaccines for children and teens that influences insurance coverage guidelines, informs state-level school vaccine requirements, and guides clinical practice. But the order shouldn’t have the legal power to make those changes, says Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
Federal vaccine recommendations are also developed through a separate legal process, never by executive order.
In January, the CDC, prompted by an earlier presidential memorandum and under direction from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attempted to revise the childhood immunization schedule. The updated schedule reduced the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccinations from 17 to 11. The six vaccines no longer recommended to all children were for COVID-19, seasonal flu, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and rotavirus. The six vaccines were only recommended for children at high risk for the respective diseases, the guidelines said. Parents, however, could decide, after consultation with doctors about the benefits and risks of the vaccines, to inoculate their children against any of the six diseases.
Trump in his new executive order called for similar changes to the childhood immunization schedule that the CDC tried to implement, and said he was “taking further action to reaffirm” the changes to the schedule in light of the ongoing litigation.
If Schwartz and the CDC attempt to change the schedule again, however, they will likely face similar legal challenges as before since the proper legal process again wasn’t followed, Reiss says.
The federal childhood immunization schedule remains the same as it was in July 2025, which recommends routine vaccines for 16 diseases. COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children are recommended based on shared decision-making between families and clinicians, rather than routinely for all children.
Insurance companies continue to cover all vaccines in the AAP vaccine schedule, including COVID-19 shots.
Splitting the MMR vaccine
Doctors say the MMR vaccine has an excellent safety record and is highly effective.
The MMR vaccines were originally licensed as separate vaccines in the 1960s, but they were combined and approved as a combination vaccine in 1971.
The executive order continues to recommend the MMR vaccine for all children, but talk of splitting the shot could cause confusion among parents, Schaffner says. “I can imagine parents going to the pediatrician and asking, ‘Can we do this one at a time? I saw on television that it’s now recommended.’”
The U.S. is currently experiencing a record-breaking measles surge. More than 2,400 measles cases have been confirmed in the U.S. so far this year—a 35-year high.
The order directs the DOJ to support or pursue lawsuits against states that fail to provide adequate religious and medical exemptions for school vaccine mandates, and tells the Department of Education to cut grants to those same states, Reiss says. States, not the federal government, determine which vaccines are required for children to attend public schools.
The executive order could also more generally put pressure on states, particularly ones that lean Republican, to dilute their own vaccine recommendations and mandates. “The real political play will be at the state level,” Reiss says.
Doubt, fear, and confusion
“This action follows an alarming pattern of government efforts to reduce Americans’ access to vaccines and sow unfounded doubt about vaccine safety and effectiveness,” said Dr. Ronald G. Nahass, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, in a statement.
Trump also claimed that children receive vaccines the size of a “bottle of soda."
He added that decades of robust studies have refuted any link between autism and vaccines.
“Kennedy is an antivaccine activist. As the secretary of the health department, you would think that he would care about the health and wellbeing of children in this country, but he doesn’t,” Offit says. “And he’s winning—now we have more cases of whooping cough, flu, and measles in children than before.”
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