Trump Tries Slashing Childhood Vaccine Schedule Again

The phrase "baseless claims" demands overtime from The NewsGuild.

It looks like the where the hell is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in all this mRNA flu vaccine BS riddle may have been solved.

Yesterday afternoon, President Trump—with Bobby standing proudly by—signed an executive order titled “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” taking another stab at dramatically shrinking and restructuring the federal vaccine schedule. The a-word was spoken. Multiple times. Out loud.

The mainstream media, as you might imagine, is already on its fourth martini.

Between sips, the country’s copy editors were frantically Googling synonyms for unfounded—because there are only so many ways to tell readers that asking questions is what stupid people do. The Washington Post managed to get “largely debunked” in by paragraph two. UPI went with “false claims.” Rolling Stone chose the ever-popular “conspiracy theory.” The AP invoked uncertainty, fear, and confusion. You could literally hear the sigh in CNN’s “… despite little scientific evidence supporting such sweeping changes.”

Somebody might want to check on NPR.

The predictable outcry aside, Trump did not, in fact, ban a single jab or order America’s children to lick escalator railings to build natural immunity. Under the new “Gold Standard recommendations,” vaccines against 11 diseases—including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus and chickenpox—remain universally recommended. Pfizer’s GoFundMe was quietly taken down.

Hep A, Hep B, RSV, dengue, and meningococcal vaccines would be moved into high-risk and/or “shared decision-making” categories, along with rotavirus, flu, and Covid shots. Translation: the family doctor may once again be permitted to participate in decisions occurring in the family doctor’s office. It’s a bold concept.

The order also calls for vaccines to be spread across separate office visits whenever feasible and for MMR to be split into three individual shots once those products are domestically available. Finally, it directs the Attorney General to pursue litigation against states that fail to provide religious and medical exemptions.

It’s basically common sense. It’s also not a magic wand that immediately rewrites every state schedule, school rule, or sweeping vaccine policy. The EO directs HHS, acting through its Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, to submit a plan for rethinking the timing and sequencing of childhood shots and beefing up safety monitoring. I’m guessing Bobby will have his homework turned in early.

POTUS kicked off his presser by comparing the number of shots our kids get with European tykes—as many as double the number in some cases—a fact that literally every news outlet completely ignored. Because if they included it, they’d have to answer a tricky question: if America’s supersized, combo-packed childhood schedule is the single scientific way to keep kids healthy, why do other wealthy countries achieve superior health outcomes with far fewer pokes and widely spaced-out shots?

Obviously, “superior health outcomes” can’t be pinned exclusively to a slimmer childhood vaccination schedule. We live in a country that’s turned deep-fried Oreos into a food group and introduced a taco with a Dorito for a shell. Clearly Denmark isn’t doing better than America solely because little Lars has fewer “well visits.” But if Country A gets by on considerably less of something than Country B without an obvious health penalty, asking whether Country B needs the supersized serving isn’t “anti-science.” It’s a literal question, something that used to be where science started—not stopped.

Before you pop the champagne (fine, after; the fact that the conversation is even happening is still worth celebrating), recall that this administration has tried this before. Twice. Kennedy’s HHS revised the childhood schedule back in January, reducing the universally recommended jabs from 17 to 11. By March, a federal judge blocked that move. Not because he ruled the pared down schedule unsafe, but because HHS allegedly skipped some of the required procedural steps getting there.

In May, Trump tried again—this time telling the CDC and ACIP to do it the proper bureaucratic way: review the international evidence and update the schedule through official channels. A slew of lawsuits promptly threw sand in those gears, too. Yesterday’s EO is less “new regulatory route” and more “we’re not letting this go.”

From the new EO.

The new order also urges states to reconsider their individual vaccine requirements, since they—not the federal government—generally decide which shots kids need to attend school. In other words, Trump can rewrite Washington’s recommendations, but he can’t cross Hep B off the entire state of California’s kindergarten checklist. That clipboard belongs to Gavin Newsom—and Governor McHairspray isn’t handing that thing over as long as he has a pen and a pulse.

The next step is the federal agency review. The problem? The revolving door between Pharma and the alphabet agencies has been spinning so long that half of D.C. could set their watch to it. These are, after all, groups being tasked with evaluating products made by companies that routinely employ their former officials—and vice versa. Add billions in FDA user fees and lobbying every year, and the coziness gets downright corrupt. You’d have to be a fool—or me—to hope that a trillion-dollar industry might respond to a government plan to plunder its profits with, “You know what? It’s probably for the best.”

And then there’s history. A fresh executive order on crisp letterhead doesn’t cure the procedural problems courts found with earlier changes. It won’t stop the medical organizations and public health groups who are already lining up to file lawsuits. It will certainly do nothing positive for Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s blood pressure. And unless Congress codifies it into law, a future administration can rescind an executive order the day the U-Haul pulls up at the White House. Basically, it fired the starting gun—again.

If HHS survives the challenges that killed the first two rounds, the CDC and ACIP have to turn the order into actual recommendations. Then states, insurers, doctors, hospitals, and school have to decide what they’re going to do with them. This isn’t merely about winning a scientific argument; it’s about dismantling an enormous regulatory, legal, and financial ecosystem that now has its own gravitational pull.

Losing odds? Maybe. That’s why they call it a Hail Mary.