For Months, The Administration Laid Low On Vaccines. On Monday, Trump Went There.

The White House has for months sought to push Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. away from controversial vaccine policies that might alienate voters ahead of the midterms.

President Donald Trump on Monday defied that effort.

With Kennedy by his side in the Oval Office, the president signed an executive order laying out his administration’s “gold standard” vaccine recommendations, which calls for children to get fewer vaccines and reduce multi-vaccine dosing.

He linked vaccines to autism, saying he thought giving children fewer vaccines would have a “huge impact” on the rise in diagnoses, said the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine can be “lethal,” and likened the amount of childhood vaccinations to “the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's body.”

“Bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump said.

Dozens of scientific studies have refuted a link between autism and vaccines.

Two people familiar with Trump’s effort, granted anonymity to discuss the genesis of the executive order, said Trump is fighting for the issue because it’s what he has long believed is right, irrespective of the strong public support for vaccines, even among Make America Healthy Again voters, and has been frustrated by a lack of progress.

He has frequently discussed vaccines with Kennedy, even while others in the White House were asking Kennedy to focus on other issues, said a third person familiar with the discussions. The person added that there are conflicting views within the administration’s upper echelons about how to address vaccines.

“People are realizing that there’s no unified voice of the White House,” the person added. “There’s a lot of individuals with different opinions.”

Monday’s executive order is the latest example of Trump veering from standard political advice ahead of a challenging midterm. The war with Iran has led to increased gas prices at a time when affordability remains a top concern of voters, and Republicans have urged him to stay focused on kitchen table issues.

After Kennedy’s initial attempt to revise the vaccine schedule in January was blocked by a court, Trump reignited efforts around the issue in May with an executive order that directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look into revisiting it, signaling that he wanted more action. He has been hammering Kennedy, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and other health officials in his administration for the last few months to get more done, the first two people said.

The end result was an executive order laying out recommendations for children to get 11 immunizations rather than the 18 currently recommended, to split the shots up into as many separate appointments as possible and to split the combined vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella into three separate shots.

While it doesn't change the recommendations on its own, the order directs agencies to take action and asks states to consider changing their vaccine guidance.

In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the president’s executive order as a way to restore trust in public health.
“Countless parents across America have had their questions about America’s childhood vaccine schedule, chronic disease epidemic, and rising rates of autism ignored or if not outright mocked,” Desai said.

Through polling from Trump’s own campaign pollsters has shown vaccine policy changes to be broadly unpopular — removing established childhood vaccine recommendations for diseases like whooping cough, measles and hepatitis was popular with just 1 in 5 voters, a 2025 poll from Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward found — there are voters in Trump’s base who see it both as a winning issue and a welcome change of tune.

Top voices in the MAHA movement have long tried to convince the administration that there is a politically palatable way to tackle the issue. Tony Lyons, a political ally of Kennedy and co-chair of the MAHA PAC, commissioned polling from the same Trump pollsters in February to push the White House and Congress to do more — though that polling, too, found “breaking up” the vaccine schedule to be the least popular MAHA issue.

Trump’s renewed push on vaccines was evidence that the president “actually cares about this issue,” said Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine activist who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

“It absolutely undoes all of the reporting that the Trump administration was afraid of talking about vaccines prior to the midterms,” he said.

Bigtree predicted that the order will “reinvigorate this [Make American Healthy Again] voting bloc for the midterms.”

Though the order’s practical effects are murky, Bigtree and other MAHA advocates cheered the focus on states, which hold the authority to mandate certain shots for school and day care entry. Many states have shored up their ability to maintain vaccine recommendations that are distinct from the CDC’s since Kennedy became health secretary.

“This won’t change New York or California. But it doesn’t have to,” Bigtree said. “It just has to hold the line” to keep Republicans in power, he added — therefore keeping Kennedy in his role and insulated from Democrat-led impeachment efforts.

But for some MAHA-adherents, the order was too little, too late.

Many who subscribe to the MAHA ideology have grown increasingly disillusioned with the Trump administration, after a series of decisions at odds with their goals. That includes the recent Food and Drug Administration approval of the first messenger RNA flu vaccine and an executive order promoting the production of glyphosate, a widely used herbicide abhorred by the movement.

It also includes the recent selection of Erica Schwartz to run the CDC, who oversaw policies encouraging vaccination while she ran the U.S. Coast Guard's health system. During her confirmation hearing last month, she repeatedly said vaccines are safe and effective and that she accepts the evidence showing that vaccines do not cause autism.

“One cannot square the Executive Order today with the fact that this administration just approved the deadly Moderna mRNA flu shot, and the Senate just voted to confirm Vaccine Fanatic Erica Schwartz to be CDC Director,” Toby Rogers, a fellow at the Kennedy-aligned Brownstone Institute, wrote on X.

Bigtree and other so-called “medical freedom” advocates acknowledged the executive order doesn’t contain everything they want, which is essentially no vaccine mandates nationwide.

But several highlighted the document’s direction to the Justice Department to “further meritorious legal actions challenging State laws that conflict with” state and federal rights for parental authority and religious freedom. That language, they said, marks a significant development in their quest to use federal courts to abolish state bans on religious exemptions to vaccine mandates.

“I love the emphasis on medical freedom for parents,” said MAHA influencer Alex Clark. “Amazing news that you can now sue if your state doesn’t allow a religious exemption.”

Public health experts were swift to condemn the order, arguing that Trump’s views are scientifically unfounded.

The potential link between autism and vaccines has been studied in more than 40 “methodologically well-designed studies” across at least seven countries, involving over 5 million children, according to American Academy of Pediatrics President Andrew Racine, who spoke to reporters on a Monday call. The primary effect of the order, he said, will be the injection of “greater amounts of uncertainty and fear and confusion where there doesn't need to be any.”

Racine and other public health experts have also pointed out that it remains unclear how the order will be carried out at the federal level because of the recent lawsuit that halted Kennedy’s first major attempt to pare back the recommended vaccines, which closely mirrored the Monday executive order. The administration is still fighting that pause, and the order attempts to circumvent the litigation by noting it covers separate policy directives.

“We got stopped by a court. We had a court, I guess, in Massachusetts that stopped us very early on. I’ve believed in this for a long time, so now we're getting it done,” Trump said.