President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday to reshape the nation’s childhood vaccine schedule after earlier changes attempted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were blocked in court.
The order calls for splitting up childhood vaccines into three categories, with different recommendations for who should get them, and directs federal agencies to implement the changes. It also proposed splitting up multiple vaccine doses, which are now used to limit the number of shots children must get, into separate shots.
“This updated recommendation finally aligns the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world,” Trump said during the signing. “More importantly, it aligns us with common sense and knowledge.”
Trump was joined at the signing by Kennedy, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health.
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Earlier this year, Kennedy bypassed a panel of vaccine advisers to pare the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11, although courts have blocked that move thus far.
Kennedy pledged that the Department of Health and Human Services would deliver on the executive order within 90 days.
“We will keep working with urgency until American parents can have confidence that the medical advice that their government gives them is worthy of their trust,” Kennedy said.
The NIH has been overseeing a research initiative to seek possible causes of autism, which Trump and health officials announced last September. The effort — which includes 13 grants to outside researchers — won’t conclude for another two years, but Bhattacharya said over the weekend NIH will release some early results “in a couple weeks.”
“It’s not going to be a simple answer,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Trump, who harbors his own vaccine skepticism, has lately been pressuring Kennedy to move faster and more aggressively on enacting more changes to the childhood vaccine schedule and probing a repeatedly debunked link between vaccines and autism, according to news reports.
Yet White House officials have also sought to throttle Kennedy’s antivaccine proclivities. Both he and Bhattacharya have said in the past week that children should generally get vaccinated when questioned in television interviews about the worst measles outbreak in decades.
Bhattacharya said the order restores “autonomy of families and parents to make good decisions for their kids.”
In January, Kennedy appointed members to a federal autism advisory board who have been involved with antivaccine organizations or questioned the safety of the shots. The advisory board, created in 2000 to develop strategic plans for autism research and services, is scheduled to meet later this month.
“Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing,” Trump said Monday. “Nothing bad can happen.”
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