In signing an executive order about childhood vaccines, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine was unsafe and that splitting up the combination shot would reduce the number of children with autism. There’s no evidence for those claims, and the vaccine has been well-studied for several decades.
Together with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he also repeated many other falsehoods we’ve fact-checked before about vaccines. We wrote about those in another article.
On Aug. 10, Trump signed the executive order aiming to overhaul childhood vaccination in the U.S. Couched in the language of “gold standard” science, but bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s typical process for recommending vaccines, the order attempts to reinstate earlier efforts by the administration to cut the number of universally recommended vaccines. The earlier changes to the vaccine schedule were blocked in court.
In addition to lowering the number of recommended vaccines and asking states to revise their immunization requirements for schools, the order also called for administering the MMR vaccine in separate shots, preferably giving all vaccines “at separate medical visits.”
“We want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine in remarks made when signing the order. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal. And separately, it looks like they...
Play Video AP: Trump makes false claims as he signs order urging revisions around childhood vaccines AP: Trump makes false claims as he signs order urging revisions around childhood vaccines N...