Trump's New Order Would Change How Kids Get Vaccines
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon in the Oval Office that aims to change how children in the United States are vaccinated. The order calls for fewer recommended childhood vaccines, splitting a commonly combined shot into separate doses, and having the Justice Department pressure states to reduce the number of vaccines required for children to attend school (NPR).
The order directs the federal government to reduce the number of childhood vaccines on the recommended schedule. It also calls for splitting the MMR shot, which is currently given as one vaccination that protects against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, into separate shots. A third part of the order directs the Justice Department to pressure states to reduce the number of vaccines required for school attendance (NPR).
At the signing ceremony, Trump said vaccines should be studied because of rising autism rates. The idea that vaccines cause autism has been studied extensively and rejected by the scientific consensus (NPR).
The order was welcomed by vaccine critics and denounced by many public health experts. Legal challenges are expected, as previous attempts to change the childhood vaccination schedule have led to court fights (NPR).
The August 10 order is the third time in less than a year that Trump has issued an executive order calling for changes to how American children are routinely vaccinated, according to The New York Times (New York Times). The effort began in February 2025, when Trump signed an order banning federal funding for COVID-19 vaccine mandates in schools (White House). That same month, he created the President's Make America Healthy Again Commission, which was directed to submit a strategy within 180 days (White House).
In September 2025, Trump linked autism to Tylenol and vaccines in claims not backed by experts. He also called for removing mercury from vaccines and said children should not receive the hepatitis B vaccine before age 12 (Reuters). In December 2025, Trump signed a memo to align U.S. childhood vaccines with those of certain other countries. This followed a decision by U.S. vaccine advisers to drop the long-standing recommendation that all American newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine (Reuters). A White House fact sheet at the time noted that when Trump returned to office in January 2025, the United States recommended vaccinating all children for 18 diseases, including COVID (White House).
On May 29, 2026, Trump signed an executive order directing the use of a Department of Health and Human Services vaccine assessment as a federal guide (Reuters). The White House published a fact sheet titled "President Donald J. Trump Realigns U.S. Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations with Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries" (White House).
Reuters reported on August 6, 2026, that the administration was considering an executive order to explore potential links between vaccines and autism, and that it could be released within days (Reuters). White House spokesman Kush Desai said at the time: "President Trump has been clear: America must have the best childhood vaccine schedule in the world" (Reuters).
The administration has also moved beyond domestic policy. In March 2025, the Trump administration planned to end U.S. funding for Gavi, an organization that helps buy vaccines for children in poor countries (Reuters).
The broader context for the August 10 order is a sustained, multi-pronged effort across executive actions, federal advisory bodies, and the Justice Department to reshape a vaccination framework that has been built over decades through the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. That committee sets the list that tells doctors which shots to give children and when. The order's directive to the Justice Department to pressure states on school requirements touches a basic tension in U.S. vaccine policy. School vaccine mandates have historically been set at the state level, meaning each state decides what shots children need to attend school. Federal attempts to influence those state decisions raise questions about whether the federal government can direct state health and education policy, and they raise the likelihood of lawsuits.
The expected court challenges will test whether the executive branch can direct the Justice Department to intervene in state health and education policy in this way.
The order's call to break up the combined MMR shot into separate injections would, if carried out, be a major change to one of the most widely given childhood vaccinations in the country. Combined vaccines cut down on the number of doctor visits and are linked to higher rates of children getting all their shots on time. Switching to a split schedule would require new purchasing, training for medical providers, and revised tracking by states, all of which would take years rather than months to carry out.
Trump's repeated linkage of vaccines to autism at the signing ceremony brings back a question that the Institute of Medicine, the CDC, and multiple large-scale studies have addressed and closed. The issue, however, has not lost its political appeal within the administration's coalition.
