Trump Signs Executive Order Backing HHS on Childhood Vaccine Reform — Will It Matter?
This is not just a vaccine fight. It is a fight over who gets to decide medical risk for America’s children.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
The order directs public health agencies to align the schedule with an HHS federal assessment published in January that calls for fewer recommended childhood vaccines. Some experts suggested the order is intended to override an April court ruling that paused recent changes, including a reduction in the number of diseases covered by the schedule. The American Academy of Pediatrics said it will challenge the order.
An executive order President Donald Trump signed late last Friday has reignited the national debate on the childhood immunization schedule.
The order directs public health agencies to align the schedule with a federal assessment published in January that calls for fewer recommended childhood vaccines and reflects the “scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries while preserving access to vaccines currently available to Americans.”
The order states:
“The scientific assessment found that the United States currently recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation, including more than twice as many vaccine doses as some European nations, and identified a set of consensus vaccines that are consistently recommended in all peer countries.”
In a Substack post, Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, wrote, “After decades in which the schedule only ratcheted in one direction — more products, more doses, earlier and earlier — this is a top-down instruction to reconsider that trajectory.”
The executive order comes amid recent suggestions that the Trump administration has strategically pivoted away from vaccine policy in the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections.
But for Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the order “is a sign that examining the childhood vaccination schedule is a true priority.”
“The U.S. gives more vaccines to children before the age of 2 than nearly all other developed peer nations. In addition, we have the highest levels of chronic illness in children in the developed world. Lowering the number of recommended vaccines would allow us to see what role vaccination plays in the chronic illness epidemic we have in our nation,” Kane said.
Medical researcher Neil Z. Miller, who in 2023 co-authored a study finding a positive statistical correlation between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses received by babies, agreed. “Many developed countries recommend a smaller set of vaccines universally while reserving others for specific risk groups. … The executive order establishes a clearer distinction between ‘core’ and ‘optional’ vaccines.”
The executive order also suggests guidance on how the federal government makes such vaccine recommendations and signals support for parental choice and the right to religious exemptions to vaccinations.
“This executive order is about far more than vaccines,” said Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News. “It’s about who gets to decide acceptable medical risk for America’s children.”
RFK Jr.’s policies brought U.S. ‘closer to other developed countries’
Trump’s order comes two months after a federal judge in Boston paused changes to federal vaccine policies that were overseen by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Those changes included:
The reduction in the number of diseases covered by the federal childhood vaccination schedule from 17 to 11.
The nomination of a slate of new members to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
A series of subsequent ACIP childhood vaccination recommendations that included delaying the MMRV vaccine until age 4 and ending the universal Hep B vaccine for newborns.
The changes followed Trump’s December 2025 presidential memorandum directing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to review the childhood vaccination schedule and compare it to “peer” countries — Denmark, Germany and Japan.
That order paved the way for the January assessment, co-authored by researchers Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D. and Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fired Høeg, who was acting director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. The circumstances of her firing remain unclear.
In a Substack post, Høeg said Trump’s new executive order validates the findings of the assessment she co-authored.
“I felt proud of the work Martin Kulldorff and I did, along with many others, to present these best practices,” Høeg wrote.
Retsef Levi, Ph.D., a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the new members Kennedy named to ACIP, said Trump’s new executive order reflects the approach adopted by ACIP before its activities were paused. He said:
“The only way to restore trust is to adopt a fundamentally different approach that is based on the empowerment of parents to make choices about their children’s health in consultation with physicians and based on transparent information and honest discussions on the current knowledge and gaps regarding benefits and risks.
“The recommendations made by ACIP since June 2025 were all aligned with this approach and brought U.S. vaccination policies closer to other developed countries.”
In December 2025, Høeg delivered a presentation to ACIP comparing the childhood vaccination schedules and health outcomes of the U.S. and Denmark. At the time, some public health figures said direct health-related comparisons between the U.S. and other countries are invalid. But Levi disagreed.
“The argument that the healthcare system in the U.S. is ‘different’ is, in my opinion, merely doubling down on lacking public health policies and flawed healthcare systems that prioritize overtreatment,” Levi said.
‘Historic admission’ that U.S. childhood schedule is a global ‘outlier’
For some in the health and medical freedom movements, the executive order isn’t enough. In a post on X, Toby Rogers, Ph.D., a fellow at the Brownstone Institute, wrote, “Instead of vague assurances, just do the thing you promised in the last election,” referring to a reduction in the childhood vaccine schedule.
Rogers suggested the executive order is meant to “shore up the medical freedom vote heading into the midterm elections” — a view shared by Rick Jaffe, an attorney challenging the court ruling that put ACIP meetings and vaccine policy changes on hold. Jaffe suggested the administration is placating the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) base after a series of pro-vaccine decisions and rulings.
But for Ji, the order represents a “historic admission” — that the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule “is an outlier among peer nations.” He said the order is “the fruit of decades of work by grassroots health-freedom advocates,” including CHD.
MAHA Action, a political action committee aligned with Kennedy and his MAHA agenda, also suggested that grassroots support and its own political strategy helped lead to the executive order, noting that the group’s latest polling found public support for Kennedy’s vaccine policies.
Not about vaccines but ‘who governs public health’ in the U.S.
Writing on Substack, Dr. Robert Malone, who formerly served on ACIP after Kennedy named him to the committee, said that while Trump’s executive order “appears to be about childhood vaccines,” it is instead “about who governs public health” in the U.S.
The order directs the CDC to review “the scientific assessment and the latest clinical data and, to the extent permitted by law, take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule.”
ACIP’s role would be to “consider ways to provide maximum flexibility to parents and doctors through recommendations for timing and sequencing of the administration of routine immunizations.”
The order outlines “the appropriate process in which ACIP is asked to weigh in on central policy questions and then make independent science-based recommendations that inform final policy decisions by elected government leaders,” Levi said.
Malone said the order “seeks to shift the debate away from the actions of a single advisory committee and back to a fundamental principle of constitutional governance: executive agencies and advisory committees advise, while elected officials establish policy and are accountable to the public for those decisions.”
Kane said this is a significant step away from an ongoing trend where, over time, ACIP’s opinion “became so relied upon as to have the weight of final authority.” Trump “is pointing out that this is not what the law actually says.”
Order signals support for parental authority, religious freedom
The executive order also contains language signaling support for parental choice and religious liberty in relation to the issue of childhood vaccination. “The Federal Government will continue to protect religious freedom and enforce all legal protections for parents,” the order states.
Leah Wilson, co-founder and executive director of Stand for Health Freedom, applauded the inclusion of this statement, which she said makes it “abundantly clear (once again) that medical mandates should become a thing of the past in the U.S.”
“It must be obvious in every healthcare encounter that the parents are honored as the primary decision-makers regarding their children’s healthcare, including vaccination decisions,” Wilson said. “This order sends an important signal that individual choice, not coercion, should define the future of healthcare in America.”
According to Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD’s senior research scientist, the order pivots away from vaccine policies that sought to sidestep parental choice.
“The entire history of public health policy surrounding immunizations has treated parental authority as a hurdle, as an inconvenience, sometimes as a reason to threaten child protective services. The order acknowledges parental authority in its rightful place, as the authority over childhood immunizations,” Jablonowski said.
Kane noted, though, that the executive order’s affirmation of religious liberty appears to contradict the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent recommendation that the U.S. Supreme Court deny an appeal by former healthcare workers who were fired after their COVID-19 vaccine religious exemptions were denied.
“For too long, parents have been expected to trust institutions that lost credibility during COVID-19. A transparent review of the childhood vaccine schedule isn’t anti-vaccine — it’s pro-accountability,” O’Connor said.
Trump order ‘designed to sidestep’ ruling pausing RFK Jr.’s vaccine policies
According to Malone, the executive order may be “designed to sidestep” the federal court ruling that froze Kennedy’s changes to federal vaccine policy.
In doing so, the executive order “reopens one of the most contentious questions in modern American public health: Who should decide what constitutes acceptable medical risk for children — the experts, elected officials, physicians, or parents?” TrialSite News reported.
However, it is unclear whether the order will succeed on that front. “It is difficult to foretell whether any new CDC vaccine schedule issued pursuant to the new Executive Order will be strong enough to overcome the current injunction or any future challenge,” said Ray Flores, senior outside counsel to CHD.
TrialSite News listed three possible scenarios that could result from the executive order:
“Incremental change” to the childhood vaccination schedule.
A “more substantial restructuring” of vaccine-related policymaking bodies.
A “stalemate,” in which “lawsuits, bureaucratic delays, leadership uncertainty, and administrative review could slow implementation for months or years.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), whose lawsuit triggered the rulings that froze changes to the vaccine schedule and put future ACIP meetings on hold, already signaled it will challenge the executive order.
Richard Hughes, an attorney for the AAP, told Politico the group is “assessing the legal implications” of the executive order, “as this flies directly in the face of the judge’s recent ruling.”
Vacancies in key public health positions — including the directorship of the CDC — may also delay the executive order’s goals, as may the confirmation of nominees not aligned with those objectives, Kane said.
“The nomination of Dr. Erica Schwartz as CDC director is a concern, for sure,” Kane said, noting her prior public support for vaccines. “We need confirmation that she will adhere to this executive order during her confirmation hearing.”
If the administration does successfully implement the executive order, Miller said possible outcomes include “more individualized scheduling and fewer situations where families feel forced into a rigid timeline.”
A reduced reliance on mandates could also help restore public trust in federal health agencies, Miller said.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, said the executive order is “a step in the right direction” to correct “the damage done” by the federal court’s ruling — and may be a step toward more substantial vaccine safety research, noting that the U.S. “sits near last on many infant health metrics.”
“This yields the opportunity for the impact of vaccines on child health to actually be studied and questioned by the ACIP committee and others, replacing years of hearing ‘trust the science’ when in truth there is no science, or only badly flawed science, to be trusted, or more appropriately, questioned,” Hooker said.
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