President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order about vaccines as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looks on in the Oval Office Monday.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
Among his many anachronistically bizarre pursuits, U.S. President Donald Trump seems hell-bent on seeing more unnecessarily sick and dead children in the wealthiest country on Earth.
On Monday, he issued an executive order calling for a revamped childhood vaccination schedule, one that would make it harder to get vaccinated and offer less protection against devastating childhood illnesses.
In short, the presidential decree called for the number of recommended childhood vaccines to fall to 11 from 17, and for the cornerstone combination MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine to be split into separate shots. To top it all off, the President ordered the Justice Department to sue states that don’t go along with his wishes.
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And he had the temerity to call all this a “major victory for parents’ rights, religious and constitutional rights, and gold standard science.” (Note the lack of mention of children’s health.)
Like almost all of Mr. Trump’s health policy pronouncements, it featured a litany of lies and unscientific bafflegab.
He renewed his fixation with the purported link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which has been debunked thoroughly, claiming the combination vaccine is “lethal.”
Mr. Trump went on to argue that this alleged risk evaporates when measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are given separately.
Again, there is zero evidence that “spacing out” shots makes a lick of difference; the MMR vaccine has been used to protect hundreds of millions of children, safely and effectively, since 1971.
The President also neglected to mention that separate shots are not available in the U.S., and that, under his proposed policy, it is highly likely fewer kids would get vaccinated and more would get sick.
The executive order renews administration attempts that began earlier this year to cut back the number of recommended vaccines. Specifically, it says vaccination against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus, respiratory syncytial virus, bacterial meningitis and influenza should no longer be routine. (So far, the move has been stopped by the courts.)
The principal argument seems to be that children receive “too many” shots, and their immune systems are overwhelmed. (Research has shown that, theoretically, a child could get 10,000 vaccines without compromising the immune system.)
At the announcement, Mr. Trump claimed children get 72 “jabs.” (Meanwhile, the White House briefing documents said 84 doses in 57 shots, and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said 94.)
In fact, children in the U.S. get around 35 injections by age five, most of them combination vaccines, and some boosters as they get older, if they follow the current recommendations.
By Mr. Trump’s dubious calculations, the three doses in the MMR vaccine and the five doses in the DTaP-IPV-Hib (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, and Haemophilus influenzae type b) vaccine are counted as separate jabs.
A sign about childhood vaccines displayed in the Oval Office on Monday.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
Paradoxically, his new policy of splitting up the MMR vaccine would significantly increase the number of needles a child would receive.
If that were not enough, Mr. Trump definitively demonstrated his ignorance of all things vaccine-related when he claimed that “vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body.”
Later, when reporters challenged him, he added: “I’ve seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.”
There are no vats or gargantuan syringes.
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A standard pediatric vaccine contains about 0.2 millilitres of liquid (and even less active ingredient), while a typical plastic bottle of soda contains 500 millilitres, or about 2,500 times more than a childhood vaccine.
These statements are so ridiculous as to be laughable. But anti-vaccine rhetoric is no laughing matter.
The repeated attacks on vaccination by Mr. Trump and his acolytes create confusion among parents and contribute to vaccine hesitancy, which has real consequences.
For example, the U.S. is in the midst of its worst measles outbreak in three decades, with 2,465 measles cases recorded this year as of Aug. 6.
Rates of vaccination among kindergarten students continue to drop, as the number of parents seeking exemptions grows. (A basic suite of vaccines is mandatory for school attendance in all 50 U.S. states, but every jurisdiction allows exemptions for medical, religious and philosophical reasons.)
As he often does, Mr. Trump shrugged off critics of his policy, saying, “there’s nothing to lose with this.” But there’s plenty to lose. Messing with a vaccine schedule that works will result in fewer children vaccinated, more illness and death, more costs, more pain, all with zero safety benefit – and some affronts to science thrown in for good measure.