Yesterday, August 10, 2026, President Donald Trump issued an executive order (Executive Order 14407) reducing the number of federally recommended vaccines for children from the current 72 to about 11. This historic change in the vaccination policy is a reversal in an ever expanding government endorsed childhood vaccination schedule. Commencing with the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, the number of illnesses children received vaccinations for has steadily expanded. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this number was relatively few – smallpox, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and polio initially, and later in the 1960’s and 1970’s, measles, mumps and rubella. Since the 1980’s Hepatitis B, Hemophilus Influenza Type B Hib), Hepatitis A, Varicella (chicken pox), pneumococcus, meningococcus, rotavirus, influenza and rotavirus have been added. Children received around a dozen vaccines on average over an 18 year period in the 1950’s and 1960’s. More recently children getting the routine CDC endorsed vaccine schedule have been getting up to 72 injections for up to 16 different infectious agents over the course of their childhood, with the bulk of them coming in the first 5 years of life.
Many were surprised by this executive order, as it had been assumed by some that vaccination was a political hot potato that Trump didn’t want to handle prior to the approaching mid-terms. Many advocates for children’s health expressed positive reactions to Trumps E.O. and many vaccine enthusiasts expressed dismay and encouraged non-compliance. Undoubtedly this will lead to increased levels of debate about the merits of vaccination in the coming months approaching the mid-term elections, particularly as Trump has mentioned the exploding rate of autism in the context of the vaccination program, raising the hackles of many who claim that research has disproven any connection between vaccines and autism.
It has been repeatedly proclaimed by vaccine supporters that autism has been shown by research to have no causal connection to vaccination. Dissenters have produced many studies indicated a strong indication of a linkage, but these are dismissed as not “proving” causation. For unstated reasons, those who insist that vaccines do not cause autism will not produce any well done research studies showing this to be true, even though they claim these studies exist in abundance.
