Trump administration order would upend nation’s childhood vaccine schedule
The Washington Post reports:
BLUF: The president has pushed to narrow which vaccines are administered to children and split shots into multiple appointments.
By Lena H. Sun, Rachel Roubein and Dan Diamond
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would upend decades of federal guidance on which vaccines are administered to children and call for states to reconsider school vaccine requirements.
Under the draft executive order obtained by The Washington Post, dubbed “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” the White House would divide vaccines into three categories and direct federal agencies to take steps to advance them.
It calls for rethinking the long-standing practice of grouping vaccines to reduce the number of medical appointments parents of small children need to schedule.
“To the maximum extent feasible, all childhood immunizations should be administered at separate medical visits,” the draft says. The order would also pursue a long-standing priority of President Donald Trump’s: breaking up the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate shots. It says the MMR vaccine should be administered as separate shots once such products become available domestically.
Trump is expected to sign the executive order as soon as Monday.
Under the plan, vaccines against 11 diseases — including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough — would be recommended for all children. Vaccines against several other diseases, including hepatitis A and B and meningococcal disease, would be recommended for certain high-risk groups or through shared decision-making between parents and doctors. Influenza and coronavirus vaccines would also fall into the shared decision-making category.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to questions about the potential order.
Trump has pushed officials to take additional steps to overhaul the childhood vaccine schedule, citing his concerns about a debunked link between childhood vaccines and autism, The Post reported last week.
The potential order obtained by The Post would represent the latest effort by the administration to sharply reshape the nation’s childhood immunization policies. In January, the administration moved to reduce the number of vaccines routinely recommended for all children, bypassing the government’s traditional process for changing the schedule.
A federal judge in March blocked the administration from implementing those changes, siding with major medical organizations that argued Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had unlawfully changed vaccine policy and improperly reconstituted the federal panel of outside experts that advises the government on vaccines.
The new draft explicitly acknowledges that the administration’s earlier vaccine directives have been “delayed due to litigation” and instructs federal agencies to advance the new recommendations “to the fullest extent allowable by law.”
Under the draft order, the White House is calling for proposed changes to come within 90 days from the health department’s Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines — a long-defunct panel resurrected last year to the cheers of anti-vaccine activists. The task force should “assess the ideal timing and sequencing of all core childhood vaccines” and adjust the childhood schedule “as appropriate,” the draft says.
It also calls for the development of more alternative adjuvants to aluminum. Adjuvants are ingredients added to vaccines that help the body produce an immune response to offer protection from diseases.
Some high-level Food and Drug Administration officials last year believed it would be infeasible to take aluminum adjuvants out of vaccines and couldn’t be done on a practical timeline.
My comments:
Typically here I would post the AI generated summary of readers’ comments on the article. As this article was published only minutes ago, there are no comments thus far.
BLUF: The president has pushed to narrow which vaccines are administered to children and split shots into multiple appointments.
By Lena H. Sun, Rachel Roubein and Dan Diamond
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would upend decades of federal guidance on which vaccines are administered to children and call for states to reconsider school vaccine requirements.
Under the draft executive order obtained by The Washington Post, dubbed “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” the White House would divide vaccines into three categories and direct federal agencies to take steps to advance them.
It calls for rethinking the long-standing practice of grouping vaccines to reduce the number of medical appointments parents of small children need to schedule.
“To the maximum extent feasible, all childhood immunizations should be administered at separate medical visits,” the draft says. The order would also pursue a long-standing priority of President Donald Trump’s: breaking up the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate shots. It says the MMR vaccine should be administered as separate shots once such products become available domestically.
Trump is expected to sign the executive order as soon as Monday.
Under the plan, vaccines against 11 diseases — including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough — would be recommended for all children. Vaccines against several other diseases, including hepatitis A and B and meningococcal disease, would be recommended for certain high-risk groups or through shared decision-making between parents and doctors. Influenza and coronavirus vaccines would also fall into the shared decision-making category.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to questions about the potential order.
Trump has pushed officials to take additional steps to overhaul the childhood vaccine schedule, citing his concerns about a debunked link between childhood vaccines and autism, The Post reported last week.
The potential order obtained by The Post would represent the latest effort by the administration to sharply reshape the nation’s childhood immunization policies. In January, the administration moved to reduce the number of vaccines routinely recommended for all children, bypassing the government’s traditional process for changing the schedule.
A federal judge in March blocked the administration from implementing those changes, siding with major medical organizations that argued Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had unlawfully changed vaccine policy and improperly reconstituted the federal panel of outside experts that advises the government on vaccines.
The new draft explicitly acknowledges that the administration’s earlier vaccine directives have been “delayed due to litigation” and instructs federal agencies to advance the new recommendations “to the fullest extent allowable by law.”
Under the draft order, the White House is calling for proposed changes to come within 90 days from the health department’s Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines — a long-defunct panel resurrected last year to the cheers of anti-vaccine activists. The task force should “assess the ideal timing and sequencing of all core childhood vaccines” and adjust the childhood schedule “as appropriate,” the draft says.
It also calls for the development of more alternative adjuvants to aluminum. Adjuvants are ingredients added to vaccines that help the body produce an immune response to offer protection from diseases.
Some high-level Food and Drug Administration officials last year believed it would be infeasible to take aluminum adjuvants out of vaccines and couldn’t be done on a practical timeline.
My comments:
Typically here I would post the AI generated summary of readers’ comments on the article. As this article was published only minutes ago, there are no comments thus far.
