A lot of people have been asking me about the recent Executive Order (EO), Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans. The most important thing to know is it can be safely ignored by anyone looking for a reliable, evidence-based guide to immunization. As always, “Gold Standard” means vague, non-specific, and largely not actionable. That’s because the main purpose of this Executive Order is to discourage people from getting vaccines.
As usual, President Donald J. Trump is ordering his underlings, mostly Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to advance his political agenda. Of course it doesn’t say that directly. I will translate since I am fluent in MAHA Doublespeak.
Purpose and Policy: Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations! In other words, reduce the childhood vaccination rate by any means available. That includes making America more like Denmark vaccine policy-wise, even though America is nothing like Denmark, because Denmark recommends fewer vaccines. Also, all federal funds related to immunization must go toward parental choice, especially the choice to not vaccinate.
Recommendations for Childhood and Adolescent Vaccines. Hear ye, hear ye, King Donald the Susceptible decrees that, owing to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) being disbanded by a federal judge in the ongoing AAP vs Kennedy litigation, the White House shall issue all vaccine recommendations despite having no authority to do so. They will meet the Gold Standard, which means the fewer, the better!
Improving Vaccine Research and Options for American Parents. Monovalent MMR shots (individual shots for each component of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine instead of the combined trivalent formulation) for all of the vaccine-skeptical MAHA parents, who would definitely prefer that their kids get six shots instead of two. Actually, no worries, because there are no monovalent MMR shots licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) anyway! Trump demands that Kennedy, America’s most famous anti-vaxxer, make them available by November.
Maximizing Parental Choice over Childhood Vaccines. Blue states not playing along with the Gold Standard? Attorney General Todd Blanche can now sue them for not having enough medical freedom! Also Education Secretary Linda McMahon will join Blanche and Kennedy in defunding programs and punishing schools in states that don’t make vaccine exemptions more widely available than healthcare.
General Provisions. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
Even though that last part means the whole thing is not actually binding in any way, it’s the latest attempt in a long series of efforts to further reduce vaccine uptake. Unfortunately, these toothless but influential measures are more effective than doing something outrageous like banning vaccines outright.
But people should understand why they should ignore this as vaccine advice. It is not just that the administration is against vaccines. It is that they want a lot of people to be unvaccinated, because they want a lot of people to get sick. Sick people are less likely to go to the polls on election day. Sick people are less likely to resist being deprived of their civil liberties and constitutional rights. Dead people don’t vote or fight back at all.
In this spirit, I’d like to explain all the ways that this EO is nonetheless designed to prevent people from vaccinating themselves or their families. It might be toothless, but it is still going to bite. Let me count the ways.
Probably the dumbest part of this EO is the premise that the White House can just seize control of our national immunization program by decree. Federal law requires vaccine recommendations be finalized by the CDC Director after they are proposed and voted on by the ACIP. The ACIP is an advisory group composed of external experts convened by CDC that reviews the evidence using established, standardized analysis methods.
At least, ACIP used to be an expert advisory group. Kennedy fired them in June 2025 and replaced them with mostly anti-vaxxers and yes-men. They immediately got to work taking down as many recommended childhood vaccines on the schedule as possible, including the MMRV (combined MMR plus varicella, AKA chickenpox), multi-dose flu vaccines, the hepatitis B birth dose, and COVID vaccines.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued Kennedy for violating federal law and policy regarding national immunization programs. In March, the judge in AAP vs Kennedy blocked ACIP from meeting on the grounds that their appointments were invalid, which also invalidated their recommendations from every meeting since they first convened last June. My friend and colleague Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS and I covered this with The Save America Movement last March.
That order also stayed the January 2026 presidential memo, which later became an EO justifying Kennedy’s decision to deschedule six different vaccines. Andrea Shaw, the Idaho mother charged with murdering her twin toddlers and blaming their deaths on a vaccine injury, joined with Kennedy’s anti-vax organization Children’s Health Defense to appeal the stay. The government also appealed, and this is working its way through the system. In the meantime, new vaccine recommendations are effectively stalled until ACIP can reconvene.
ACIP has not met since December 5, 2025, due to the court order. The 2025 CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule remains the official vaccine recommendations for American kids. Although this is good in the sense that none of the efforts to deschedule vaccines have succeeded, there is no mechanism to make new vaccine recommendations. Seasonally updated vaccines like flu and COVID shots don’t require new ACIP recommendations, but any other new vaccines do. ACIP recommendations are required for access because they are used by insurance companies to determine coverage.
HHS has managed to push a concerning new ACIP charter through, despite several failed attempts to put the CDC Director unilaterally in charge as an end run around the court order. However, until there is an ACIP that has undergone the conventional vetting process and has adequate expertise in place, nobody can make vaccine recommendations. As a result, they are now trying an end run around ACIP by declaring that the White House will just make vaccine recommendations by royal proclamation henceforth.
Trump does not have the authority to make official vaccine recommendations, but he is pretending that he does anyway. Most people very reasonably don’t know the ins and outs of the federal statutes and rulemaking policies that govern ACIP, so they will see an announcement that the White House is taking vaccination up to the Gold Standard. They will hear that the Gold Standard means fewer vaccines. Kennedy does not need to ban what people choose not to get because the President lied to them about it.
Last year, Trump gave a press conference in which he announced that the cause for autism had been discovered and it was…TYLENOL! (It is not. Autism is mostly genetic.) Vaccines were implicitly blamed, because they cause fevers that make moms reach for the only safe analgesic approved for pain relief and fever reduction in pregnant women and babies. Trump talked about babies “frying” after getting their first MMR shot and shouted about breaking up the combined shot into monovalent doses. I am paraphrasing, because he did not use the term “monovalent.”
At the time, I predicted that the intent here was to say that the combined shot is unsafe because of the fever risk and the only way to safely reduce the fever risk is taking the autism pill, so the only option is monovalent M, M, and R shots.
The EO says this takes effect “once such products are domestically available.” That will be never.
There are no FDA-approved monovalent shots, so this would further drive down already plummeting MMR vaccination rates by creating demand for products that don’t exist. Merck announced in 2009 it would not resume production of its monovalent products and FDA discontinued monovalent Meruvax II (rubella) in 2011. Merck confirmed this month that it could take as many as ten years to carry the measles component through to licensing as a standalone monovalent formulation. There is no demand for monovalents, because they are not safer or more effective than the combination MMR. Using monovalents means six shots instead of two, which most people prefer.
The FDA will not license any monovalents any time soon since none are in clinical trials. There won’t be monovalents available by November as Trump has demanded, because that’s not possible from either a manufacturing or regulatory standpoint. No manufacturer is going to make a product there is no demand for, especially if it requires huge pediatric clinical trials costing millions. There are no monovalent measles, mumps, or rubella vaccines in the US because they are not needed and nobody actually wants them.
Unfortunately, that does not matter. The regime is well aware that they can’t enforce this or make monovalent measles vaccines appear out of the ether. They want people to insist on an imaginary alternative, because it will create demand for a product that will never materialize. People will keep waiting for Trump to fulfill yet another empty promise. I suspect many of them will keep on waiting forever rather than take a chance on a vaccine that the President has suggested is unsafe.
Just as there is no good scientific reason for monovalent MMR vaccines, there is no good reason to give different vaccines at different appointments. All it does is inconvenience parents and extend your kid’s risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease.
Delays caused by breaking up routine childhood vaccinations might actually increase risk, both of infection and of side effects. A study of more than 300,000 children showed that delaying the first MMR shot past 15 months increased febrile seizure risk. The CDC has accurate, evidence-based guidance on how vaccination should be timed (at least for now). This supports combined administration of recommended vaccines to all people, including babies and children. Contrary to what the EO implies, there are no safety risks from getting multiple vaccines the same day.
Kennedy has been making the rounds telling a lot of whoppers about vaccine safety these days, including repeating Trump’s false claims that babies are being pumped so full of untested vaccines they are going to inflate like little water balloons.
I really hate it when I am forced to Tweet math but running the numbers is the quickest way to see that even if babies get more than one shot in a single visit, they aren’t getting the volumetric equivalent of a can of White Claw. Babies do not get more than half a teaspoon of liquid injected into them at any given scheduled vaccination appointment. Also, all vaccines on the market have been tested with placebo-controlled trials and other types of clinical trials too.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen@angie_rasmussen
Apologies for the math, but if a vaccine is 0.5 mL, then you’d need at least 1000 shots to inject the same volume as a 500 mL soda bottle. Pediatric doses are often smaller volumes so for a 0.1 mL dose, that’s 5000 shots. He’s also lying about placebo-controlled trials.
Acyn @Acyn
Michaelson: In terms of that idea of it’s the size of a soda bottle. I mean, that's not accurate. Right? RFK JR: What you should be concerned with is the fact that none of these vaccines have been tested in placebo controlled trials. (This is a claim that he has made across
11:18 AM · Aug 15, 2026 · 56.2K Views
67 Replies · 286 Reposts · 1.23K Likes
The only thing spacing individual vaccinations to separate appointments does is create more appointments for busy parents to go to. For parents with health insurance, this can still mean a lot of co-pays. For parents without health insurance or in areas without easy access to health care, making six appointments instead of two may not be an option. Traveling, time off work, and navigating the American health system are all strong deterrents for many busy parents who would otherwise vaccinate their kids. For many families, scheduling vaccinations as a series of individual appointments means more barriers and less access to essential healthcare for their kids.
Apart from the fact that there are no concerns about the volume of liquid being injected and the overall trend of kids and parents alike preferring fewer shots and doctor visits, there is no immunological reason to space vaccinations out either. Vaccination specifically induces immunity ONLY to what you are being vaccinated with.
We normally make an incredible diversity of antibodies and immune cells that specifically recognize individual pathogens. These cells circulate around doing nothing until your first exposure (vaccination or infection). When you get vaccinated with the MMR combined shot, three separate immune responses occur, not a single immune response that deals with all three components of the vaccine. Your measles-, mumps-, and rubella-specific B and T cells are activated individually and take off from there. This induces immune memory so that you will have durable, rapid immune responses in the future. There is no way to overload your immune system with too many vaccines on the same day because you already have as many specific immune cells as there are specific pathogens.
This figure shows how that process works. Immunology is very complex, but basically the process involves T and B cells becoming activated specifically by the vaccine, multiplying, and differentiating into memory cells with different immune roles to play. B cells make antibodies. CD8 “killer” T cells kill any infected cell they come across. CD4 “helper” T cells activate and coordinate a potent, extremely rapid response if the pathogen ever shows up. Otherwise, they vigilantly wait, standing guard over your entire body like a lymphocytic guardian angel. Vaccination makes your immune system healthier, which in turn keeps you (and your kids) healthy.
Immune systems can cope with a lot all at once. I had to get some vaccines for work once and I got immunized for mpox/smallpox, yellow fever, COVID, meningitis, and rabies on the same day. That means I was immunized with two live virus vaccines (mpox and yellow fever), an mRNA vaccine, a quadrivalent conjugate vaccine (sugar-protein), and an inactivated vaccine (rabies) against four very unrelated viruses and four classes of meningococcal bacteria. My immune system had no problem with this because it already is designed for multitasking.
Every time you eat or breathe in the unfiltered air, your immune system is getting blasted with a bunch of foreign things: particles in the air, the molecules that make up your food, the bacteria and fungi and microbes that live on and in your body, and the viruses that infect them. The immune system has evolved over millions of years to deal with all of these at once and to distinguish between food, friend, or foe. It is very capable of correctly classifying harmless foreign things from pathogens, which is why even a baby’s immune system is not going to be overwhelmed by a few vaccine antigens.
After all these vaccines, I had a very low fever, felt fatigued, and was somewhat achy for about 24 hours. This was probably due primarily to the yellow fever vaccine, which is known to cause these exact side effects. Yellow fever is endemic in parts of South America and Africa. It is transmitted by mosquitoes whose habitat range is expanding due to climate change. Mortality can be up to 20% in some outbreaks. The vaccine is 99% effective for life. I’ll exchange a day of feeling kind of lousy for never dying from yellow fever. And I’ll definitely take a single visit for this as opposed to multiple trips to the vaccine clinic.
The EO orders HHS to “develop additional alternative adjuvants to aluminum and conduct comparative safety and efficacy studies.” Adjuvants are effectively boosters that are added to inactivated or protein subunit vaccines to increase immunogenicity—the ability of a vaccine to generate durable immune responses. Viral replication triggers a lot of alarms for the immune system, so live attenuated vaccines generally generate more robust immunity. Inactivated and protein subunit vaccines don’t replicate like live attenuated vaccines, so they are not always very immunogenic. Adjuvants are added to pump up the immunity.
One of the oldest and most common adjuvants are aluminum salts, which are just that: a type of salt. They are naturally occurring chemicals that have been used for a century (yes, alum’s adjuvant properties were first described in 1926) in many different vaccines. They are not elemental aluminum metal. Aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines do not contain foil or solid aluminum. However, the EO continues the administration’s tradition of pretending that aluminum salt adjuvants are harmful.
Last summer, Kennedy wrote a paper blog post demanding that a Danish study be retracted by the Annals of Internal Medicine on the grounds that it was statistically unsound and that the authors had undisclosed conflicts of interest. The study in question studied nearly two million children over decades and showed no link between aluminum vaccine adjuvants and autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. As usual, Kennedy was making things up about vaccines causing autism again.
Aluminum Standard Science
·
August 3, 2025
Note from Angie (August 3, 2025): Anders Hviid, the lead author of the study RFK, Jr. is criticizing, has responded with a blog entry of his own pointing out how wrong Kennedy is about their study and categorically denying any financial conflicts of interest or deceptive practices.
As usual, it doesn’t make any kind of scientific sense. Aluminum adjuvants are not in the MMR, which is a live-attenuated vaccine. Because the MMR contains weakened viruses, it does not need to contain adjuvants. I suppose the idea is that both the MMR and adjuvants each independently cause autism, because if it involves vaccines, it must cause something!
The MAHA machine is hard at work manufacturing evidence of these fantasy vaccine injuries. Anti-vax extremist, anti-abortion obstetrician, Louisiana’s new Surgeon General, and currently stayed ACIP member Evelyn Griffin presented an outrageously misleading review of aluminum salt adjuvants last December.
She presented slides suggesting that aluminum metal will accumulate in your baby’s body until there is so much liquid metal in their bloodstream they are practically a T-1000. In reality, 1,225 mcg (micrograms, and the SI system canonically uses the Greek mu to denote this unit of mass) is not an amount that will fit in a even a 1 mL syringe unless it is very dilute. It certainly doesn’t look like a needle full of molten aluminum metal. 1,225 μg is 1.225 milligrams. That’s about the size of two or three grains of salt.
MMR contains no adjuvant. No live-attenuated vaccine on the US childhood schedule contains one. Like everything else, the EO’s demand that Kennedy muster America’s scientific talents to study natural salts that have been used for a hundred years. The entire “aluminum is bad” hypothesis has no basis in scientific reality. It is a lie intended to deceive you into believing that vaccines are unsafe. That is simply not true.
Kennedy is not the only one who has new action items to execute. The EO also directs Attorney General Todd Blanche to sue states that are too strict about school immunization requirements or don’t allow enough exemptions. Blanche is challenging Kennedy’s dominance at child-hurting in the Trump Cabinet, judging by his actions to suppress evidence of child rape and sex trafficking in the Epstein files and now this mandated assault on states’ rights to not have children die from preventable diseases. The Trump administration is committed to providing Blanche the means to hurt as many children as possible.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is also key personnel in the Trump administration’s assault on American children. McMahon and Kennedy will cut off federal grant funding for schools, universities, and colleges that enforce vaccine requirements. The price of an education these days is, evidently, measles, meningitis B, COVID, flu, pertussis, and chickenpox. I am already beginning to manage my grief and horror for the polio cases that I fear are now inevitable.
This is the Trump administration, after all, so it wouldn’t meet the Gold Standard if it didn’t include a mechanism to shake down any state or any person that might object or refuse to comply. That includes all 28 of the states that have already refused.
I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t speak to the federal government’s legal standing to sue states or school districts over their vaccine requirements or exemption laws. Their standing to capriciously strip grant funding is being challenged in multiple courts. In many ways it doesn’t matter, because that’s not the point of the EO. It isn’t binding. Blanche can sue as many states and school districts as the American public will tolerate, but they know they can’t actually enforce pronouncements that actively hurt American children. Therefore, they have to convince the American public that this is good, actually. Or at least that vaccines are bad.
One of the projects I am working on with The Save America Movement is putting my systems biology skills to good use in defending science, public health, and democracy. More on these efforts to come, but I’ve been putting together training data and I can use it to visualize fun vaccine facts throughout American history. Like how over the past ten years, more and more people are requesting exemptions from their kids’ school vaccination requirements.
The point of this EO is to get people to obey in advance. It is to confuse people and sow just enough doubt that it convinces people not to act in their own best interests. In Idaho, a former financial executive turned anti-vax legal activist named Leslie Manookian worked with Children’s Health Defense to pass a law making vaccine mandates illegal. As a result, Idaho’s vaccine exemption rate has soared to 17.5%. Guess what is also super low in Idaho?
Idaho has the lowest MMR vaccination rate in the country. There have only been 26 measles cases in Idaho so far this year, but I doubt those numbers are going to hold. Idaho health officials are talking about back to school like they are anticipating the Bataan Death March. I hope the inevitable Idaho measles outbreak does not coincide with a bad flu season or surge in COVID cases, because that’s when healthcare systems become overwhelmed. This is especially risky in states with large rural tracts like Idaho, because access to healthcare is already limited. The massive Medicaid cuts that take effect in 2027 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will devastate rural health care.
On the bright side, Idaho will probably not endure extortionate cuts in federal funding since they demonstrably enjoy so much medical freedom. Their Gold Standard indoctrination is coming along nicely. When Idaho’s children suffer terribly as a result of their leaders lying to them and passing laws that are guaranteed to harm their health, it will be too late to undo the damage.
The number one question I get about this is “what do I do?” People honestly don’t know if it’s an order, or a new policy, or an opinion, or it’s based on new evidence, or what it’s all about. It’s none of those things. It is propaganda. It is based on a non-peer-reviewed glowing feature story fluffing foreign vaccine policies that was authored by a sports medicine physician who was fired from the FDA and Kennedy’s first ex-ACIP Chair who once compared vaccines to hotdogs and challenged nine former CDC Directors who criticized him to a debate. What should you actually do about it?
You should ignore it. Seriously. Don’t pay attention to it at all. It is inaccurate and it is designed to manipulate you. The goal is to prevent you from vaccinating, whether via doubt, anger, or confusion. There is bait for everyone in this EO. Don’t take it.
You should also make sure you and your kids are up to date on vaccinations, especially the MMR. The MMR is 97% effective at preventing measles, but it only works if you get it. Kids are due for their first MMR shot between 12-15 months. If I were the parent of an infant, I’d be in my pediatrician’s office on their first birthday, given that measles abounds. The MMR was licensed in 1971. We have more than five decades of data and mountains of evidence from both clinical trials and aftermarket follow-up. Billions of people worldwide have been protected against three terrible diseases for life because of this vaccine.
If you have questions about a reliable recommended vaccine schedule, I would normally send you to the CDC. For now, while ACIP is stayed, the recommended schedule is the last evidence-based one from 2025. That could change, however, depending on what happens in AAP vs Kennedy and any other surprises Trump and Kennedy might have in store.
So I am following the lead of all the states who have rejected politically motivated vaccine recommendations and sending people to the AAP’s recommendations.
Finally, you should join me and Anita K. Patel, MD on Tuesday right here for a live Q&A about vaccination for back to school and about this wretched EO. We and The Save America Movement are working hard to keep you informed and your kids safe and healthy. Please subscribe to keep the information coming and please do drop in on Tuesday! Bring your questions or put them in the comments and we’ll answer them all!
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