Photo: WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 10: U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by (L-R) National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, Jayme Leagh Franklin with the The Conservateur, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Dr. Heidi Overton, takes a question from reporters after Trump signed an executive order calling for childhood vaccine shots to be spaced out into separate visits during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on August 10, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump signed a new executive order this week introducing the “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” which aims to reduce the number of vaccines each child receives and give parents greater control over their children’s medical care.
Currently, the childhood vaccine schedule in the United States recommends immunization against 18 diseases totaling as many as 72 separate injections. Trump’s order will bring the United States more in line with other developed nations in Europe, where children receive only 11 injections, according to an X post from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
No longer! Thank you, President Trump and @SecKennedy!
While families will still have access to the vaccines no longer on the immunization schedule, those vaccines “are now recommended for shared clinical decision-making, ensuring that parents have all options available to them,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The executive order additionally recognizes that the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine “should be administered in three separate single-disease shots once such products are domestically available” and should also be administered during separate doctor visits.
During a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump explained that his new executive order aligns the United States with other developed nations and common sense.
“This updated recommendation finally aligns the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world. More importantly, it aligns us with common sense and knowledge,” the president said. “Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today, and in those times, people were much healthier.”
The executive order also recommends that states consider these new vaccine standards and update their laws to reflect them. States are encouraged to comply with constitutional and federal law “related to parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law, including states’ obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”
The order also directs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to present plans to the president “to improve vaccine research and options for American parents, including continuous evaluation of the risk and benefit profiles of all childhood vaccines based on U.S. and international data.”
Kennedy explained that one goal of the executive order is to help determine whether there is any link between vaccines and autism. Kennedy has long suggested that the dramatic increase in childhood autism cases may be linked to some vaccines and has called for more research into the matter.
“Something happened in the mid-90s that changed our children, and it has to be an environmental exposure because genes don’t cause epidemics,” Kennedy said. “They can provide the vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.”
The president’s executive order is a response to the Department of Health and Human Services report from January assessing the childhood immunizations of American children compared to children in other countries. The report found that the U.S. “currently recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation, including more than twice as many vaccine doses as some European nations.”
The report’s suggestion was to lower the number of recommended vaccines to eleven, which the new order accomplishes.
Trump’s action this week represents another major victory for “Make America Healthy Again” advocates, who have pushed the federal government to take a fresh look at the childhood immunization schedule. While it is unclear at this point how states will react (states, not the federal government, typically determine what vaccines are required to attend public schools) the Trump administration is at the very least sparking a serious conversation about the necessity of certain vaccines and the rights of parents when it comes to making healthcare decisions for their children.
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