Order to overhaul vaccine protocol endangers the nation’s children

Administration promotes dangerous anti-vaccine agenda

President Trump’s executive order to overhaul the nation’s scientifically supported vaccine protocols endangers America’s children, advocates said, and promotes a debunked and dangerous anti-vaccine agenda.

“This is not gold standard science. It’s a rollback,” said First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley. “We are living through a 35-year measles high, and the Administration’s answer is to make it harder for a child to get fully vaccinated on time. Turning one appointment into three doesn’t reduce risk to a child — it triples the number of visits a working family has to make it to, on schedule, for that child to be protected at all. The Administration is pushing an agenda that leaves more and more children unprotected from vaccine-preventable illnesses.”

The executive order signed Monday would cut the number of federally recommended childhood vaccines, push the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine toward three separate shots instead of one, and direct the Department of Justice to scrutinize states over vaccine exemptions in an attempt to revive an anti-vaccination agenda a federal court blocked just five months ago. In issuing the order, President Trump linked vaccines to autism, a piece of disinformation that has been disproved by dozens of comprehensive studies.

The executive order is the Administration’s second attempt to roll back vaccines for the nation’s children. In March, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a preliminary injunction in American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy that restored the pre-2025 federal vaccine recommendations while the case continues. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claiming that HHS had unlawfully reconstituted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and bypassed it to cut the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 recommended immunizations to 11.

“Having lost this fight in court, the Administration is trying to impose its anti-immunization agenda by executive fiat,” Lesley said.

AAP has also rejected the order. AAP President Dr. Andrew Racine said the order is not based on “gold-standard science,” noting there is no new evidence to justify significant changes to childhood immunization guidance and that dozens of studies involving millions of children have found no link between vaccines and autism.

Surveys commissioned by the President’s pollster, FabrizioWard, found in August 2025 that 86% of voters believe it is important for people to receive the MMR vaccine, 85% believe vaccines save lives, and 90% want vaccine policy based on scientific evidence rather than politics.

“The public isn’t asking for this,” Lesley said. “Pediatricians aren’t asking for this. This order responds to a court loss and fails the children it claims to be protecting.”