On August 10, 2026, Trump signed an executive order reshaping federal childhood-vaccine recommendations, formalizing a draft first reported on August 6. The order directs the Department of Health and Human Services to reassess the sequencing and timing of childhood vaccines within 90 days and recommends cutting the list of diseases all children are vaccinated against from 18 to 11.
It also calls for splitting the combination measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot into three separate single-disease shots and for administering childhood immunizations at separate visits rather than together. No single-disease MMR-component vaccines are currently approved or available in the United States, so the change would require new products that do not yet exist.
The text of the order reportedly did not name autism, but Trump repeatedly invoked a link between vaccines and autism in his remarks, a link that decades of studies involving millions of children have found does not exist. “While we do not know exactly what the cause is with respect to autism,” Trump said, “it is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist before joining the cabinet, said the department “will examine every biologically plausible hypothesis and leave no legitimate, scientific question unexplored.” Republican pollsters and many of Trump's own advisers had urged him to drop the issue before the November midterms (see The CDC Website Now Says 'Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism' Is 'Not an Evidence-Based Claim', After a Presidential Memo, HHS and CDC Cut the Number of Vaccines Recommended for All Children and Trump Makes RFK Jr., Who Promoted the Debunked Vaccine-Autism Theory for Decades, His Health Secretary).