The new Trump vaccine order could kill thousands of Americans

It’s hard to know where to start with Donald Trump’s executive order of 10 August on childhood vaccinations. Perhaps with what it says? The order – which gives recommendations only, since vaccine policies are set by individual US states – says that all children should receive just 11 of the current 18 vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

It recommends separating the combined MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine into three separate shots. And it says that each vaccine should be given on a separate medical visit, not together.

On what grounds are these changes being made? The vaccine-hesitancy of Trump and his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy is well known. Both are convinced that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism: the thesis presented in a fraudulent and now thoroughly debunked 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and coworkers.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently has a web page on “Autism and Vaccines” containing the statement that “…‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism”.

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This is on a par with Bertrand Russell’s famous statement that, to paraphrase in the same terms, “…‘there is no teapot orbiting between Earth and Mars’ is not an evidence-base claim because studies have not ruled out that possibility.” It shows that Kennedy has not the slightest idea what science means.

Trump’s statements on signing the order were the sort of deranged free association that has become his depressing trademark. He said that the MMR shots were “sort of like a nuclear weapon” and could be “quite lethal”.

When asked for evidence of the latter, he said: “What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way.” He went on to claim that the doses were the size of a soda bottle, being “poured” into the child. In fact a single three-vaccine shot is the equivalent of about ten drops of water.

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There is no method in Trump’s madness, but Kennedy is playing a more careful game. It’s for psychologists to speculate about why he is (and indeed so many rightwing conspiracy theorists are) so opposed to vaccines, but he knows that he can’t come out and say that explicitly without incurring the opprobrium of all competent medical professionals.

So he asserts in a recent CNN interview that he “never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine”, while sowing confusion with lies at every opportunity, for example asserting that the vaccine causes many deaths every year as well as the same afflictions as measles itself: encephalitis, blindness and so on. The CDC says there can sometimes be side effects, but that the vaccine is much safer than the diseases.

By creating more confusion and vaccine scepticism, the changes to child vaccine recommendations are sure to lead to more childhood illness, and it will be a miracle if that doesn’t mean more deaths. Because the full schedule of jabs now needs many more visits to the doctor, some will be missed.

Single shots for mumps, measles and rubella are currently not available in the US; making them will be costly and expensive. And some children will catch the diseases before they have completed all the shots.

Meanwhile, 2026 has so far seen more than 2,500 confirmed measles cases in the US. In previous years the numbers were typically in the low hundreds or fewer; before a measles vaccine was licensed in 1963, they could reach close to half a million.

But the harm goes still deeper: the Trump administration continues to live with impunity in a paranoid fantasy world with total contempt for science, expertise, and facts.