Breaking up the MMR vaccine makes total sense

RFK Jr’s plan to dismantle America’s vaccine program took a giant leap forward on Monday when Trump signed an executive order, “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans.” As you might imagine, there’s nothing gold standard about this, including the shit show of a press conference.

A repeated anti-vax claim appeared during this conference, as well as across MAHA media afterwards: children get “72 injections.” The White House even published this on Twitter the same day:

That count includes annual flu and COVID-19 shots repeated every year for 18 years, which alone account for roughly half of 72. The number also treats every dose as a separate injection even though many are combined into single shots.

Under the actual pre-executive order schedule, a baby receives roughly a dozen to 30 shots by age 2, depending on how many combination vaccines were used and whether annual flu and COVID doses were counted.

Kennedy’s friends over at The MAHA Report dutifully confused the numbers:

Instead of the current 72 doses of 17 different vaccines, the president’s order will have the CDC recommending vaccines for children for 11 different diseases.

MAHA activists regularly play loose with math. Have you also heard that the COVID-19 vaccine resulted in an 82% miscarriage rate? Also bullshit, debunked back in 2021 by Dr Jen Gunter. Incredible timing for that one to make a comeback across MAHA influencer channels this week, including by Kennedy’s business partners.

The claim is based on a 2021 NEJM/CDC v-safe study of pregnant women who receieved COVID vaccines, but the 82% figure comes from a statistical trick. The original study found a 12.6% miscarriage rate among 827 pregnancies with complete data—an expected background rate. Influencers weaponized the study by throwing out ~700 participants vaccinated in the third trimester (when miscarriage is essentially impossible by definition) and also excluding ongoing pregnancies that hadn't concluded yet at the time of the analysis.

This trick left a cherry-picked slice of 127 people who'd been vaccinated in the first two trimesters, of whom 104 had miscarried. If they included all pregnancies, the rate returns to roughly 8.5–13%, matching normal background miscarriage rates in the general population, vaccinated or not.

That didn’t stop influencers like Dave Asprey and Josh Axe from doing no research whatsoever to repeat the misinformation.

During the press conference, Trump also claimed that he witnessed babies getting vaccines the size of a “bottle of soda,” which isn’t even worth replying to.

This directive, however, is:

The Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations also recognize that the combined measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine should be administered in three separate single-disease shots once such products are domestically available and that, to the maximum extent feasible, all childhood immunizations should be administered at separate medical visits.

If the whole point is to have fewer “injections,” why would Kennedy push for three separate vaccines?

In fact, this is pulled right from the anti-vax playbook.

First: treatment burden. In other words, the cumulative demand of managing care outweighs patient capacity. This shows up most clearly when visits are frequent, complex, or logistically costly.

A 2012 review article frames adherence as a balance between “workload” (self-management tasks, appointments, travel, medication demands) and “capacity” (time, money, health literacy, social support).

When workload, including the sheer number of required visits, exceeds a patient's capacity, the predicted and observed result is disengagement from care.

Which is exactly what Kennedy is banking on. The executive order might break up the MMR vaccine, but during the press conference, Trump noted that every doctor visit should only equal one vaccine of any kind.

Quite the burden. Last fall, I received my second dose of the shingles vaccine, a COVID booster, and the annual flu vaccine in one visit. Sure, the next day was not fun, but it beats having three slightly less horrible next days—plus travel time (for me, about 40 minutes roundtrip to my pharmacy), leaving my desk during the workday, and negating the sheer convenience of the bundle.

New parents already have enough of their minds. Juggling three separate vaccine appointments is an unnecessary hassle. Yet one that would further reduce vaccination rates, something America has been enduring anyway. Kennedy knows splitting up the vaccine will expedite this process.

The second reason for splitting up the vaccine is to foment continued distrust.

The MMR vaccine is highly effective. Now, under cover of federal recommendations, Kennedy takes another step in frightening parents: If this vaccine isn’t safe, why would I believe three separate vaccines are?

When asked if he takes any responsibility for America’s measles outbreak, the largest in 35 years, here’s his reply:

It’s not surprising Kennedy refuses to take responsibility for his anti-vax activism, which has impacted national vaccination rates. Nor that he blames anything on Anthony Fauci. It’s kind of his thing.

But according to Kennedy, the MMR vaccine is dangerous. And here he claims the current measles outbreak is due to people not getting the dangerous vaccine (which, by the way, is a moot point given that the CDC led “make up” campaigns in 2021-22 once lockdowns were over).

There’s no sense to be made out of any of this, save that we’re all being held captive to the TRT-addled brain of a lifelong conspiracy theorist. We know he’ll never take responsibility for any of the pain he’s caused, nor the unimaginable destruction of public health he’ll leave behind.