On August 10, 2026, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order supporting several changes to the vaccine schedule and pushing anti-vaccine nonsense.

During the signing “ceremony” for the vaccine Executive Order, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr made some statements about vaccines that were patently false. Kennedy and Trump love to bat around the term “gold standard science” when discussing vaccine safety, even though the diamond level of science has shown that vaccines are safe and effective.

This post will examine a few of those statements and, of course, debunk them. Trump and Kennedy don’t use any scientific evidence at all to support their claims about vaccines.

Trump’s vaccine Executive Order false claims

Trump said during his vaccine Executive Order signing:

You have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they are quite lethal and separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal but just very effective.

Professor Dorit Rubinstein Reiss thoroughly debunked this part of the Executive Order. Basically, scientific evidence shows that the MMR vaccine is safe and effective. It is not “quite lethal.”

Also, splitting the vaccine into its constituent components is a regulatory headache that could take up to 10 years to accomplish. Of course, splitting the MMR vaccine into three separate shots goes against some of the desires of the anti-vaccine world to reduce the number of shots, so this does not make sense.

Worse yet, parents will be confused by this statement and refuse to vaccinate their children with the MMR vaccine until it’s split into three separate shots.

Trump said:

Large amounts of vaccine, large amounts of like vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body. I’ve seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.

This is completely false; there are no “vats of vaccines” pumped into a child’s body. The maximum vaccination volume is around 0.5 mL, but it’s usually 0.1 to 0.3 mL. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the metric system, a teaspoon of liquid is only about 5.0 mL. Instead of “vats,” vaccinations usually are a few drops of liquid.

Of course, a plastic bottle of soda contains about 500 mL of liquid, or about 2500 times as much as is found in a typical vaccine.

I think Trump is confused by those anti-vaccine memes that show giant syringes filled with a mysterious liquid being forced into crying babies. Of course, Trump usually gets his information from memes rather than scientific facts.

Trump pontificated:

In many cases, we were requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.

This is absolutely untrue. Excluding seasonal flu and COVID shots, the CDC recommended only 36 shots for 18 diseases. Of course, the CDC recently changed the recommended vaccine schedule to just 23 shots. Parents could choose to add other vaccines for their children, but no one is forcing them to do this.

Trump claims:

There’s nothing that we lose with this. The worst thing that would happen would be nothing happens. We’re not going to lose anything.

This is medically and scientifically false. We’ve seen that even small decreases in the MMR vaccination rates have led to measles outbreaks across the country. The vast majority of children who get measles were unvaccinated.

The only thing that’s going to happen is that additional diseases will start to reappear. Polio, diphtheria, chickenpox, tetanus, and many others will return in levels not seen since the 1950s and 60s. That’s definitely not Making America Healthy Again.

It wasn’t just Trump passing on false information during the Executive Order signing. RFK Jr said:

In 1970, the biggest epidemiological study at that time in history was performed. And the university scientists from across this country looked at all the 8-year-olds in Wisconsin, about 900,000 children, and they were looking for autism. And they knew what autism looked like. And they came back with an incidental rate of 0.8 per 10,000. So less than one in 10,000. The rate according to CDC today in this country is one in every 31 children.

The number of cases has indeed increased. However, health officials have largely attributed growing autism numbers to better recognition of cases, through wide screening and better diagnosis. Back in the 1960s, only severe cases of autism were included in the number. Today, autism spectrum disorder includes a broader range of behavioral and communication issues, meaning milder cases are included in today’s numbers that weren’t the standard in 1970.

Moreover, many gold-standard epidemiological studies have shown no links between vaccines and autism. There is no link, no matter how often Trump and RFK Jr shout it from their bully pulpit.

Summary

President Trump and RFK Jr are trying their best to damage vaccine policy in the US with this new executive order, which is based on bad science and outright lies.

On the other hand, many states with vaccine mandates are going to ignore this Executive Order because they don’t want their children to get sick from deadly and dangerous diseases. Unfortunately, Professor Reiss explains that the Executive Order includes:

Asking the DOJ to bring lawsuits against states that have vaccine mandates without – or without sufficient – religious and medical exemptions. Asking the Department of Education to cut grants for states that don’t have them. The first could happen. California has no non-medical exemption and review of the medical, so we could be among the targets. There is already litigation on this, so the DOJ could join it or bring its own, and I don’t know how that will play

All of this increases the confusion about vaccines while putting our children at risk of dying from diseases that we all thought were gone 50 years ago.

I hope that 90% of parents continue to vaccinate their children, but I worry that future surveys will show a precipitous drop in the vaccination rate. That seems like the goal for Trump and RFK Jr. Say anything, regardless of the scientific facts, that makes vaccines appear to be dangerous.

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