By ALI SWENSON
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump pivoted the nation’s attention back to vaccines this week with an executive order that aims to scale back the childhood immunization schedule and space out shots into separate visits.
After acting to overhaul the nation’s vaccine policy and guidance, the Trump administration had recently largely stepped back from additional changes to focus on less controversial subjects, raising questions over the political impetus behind and implications of the Republican president’s renewed focus on vaccines.
For well over a decade, Trump has expressed his view — against medical groups’ guidance — that childhood vaccines should be administered in smaller doses over a long period of time. The executive order sought to bear out that discredited theory.
While the move could endear Trump to some “Make America Healthy Again” voters who want more flexibility on immunizations, it’s also already attracting attacks designed to hurt Trump’s aligned candidates in November’s midterm elections.
Jayme Franklin, a 28-year-old conservative activist who appeared with the president to promote his executive order on Monday, said she thinks the action is “going to go a long way” for MAHA mom voters like herself.
But Shaughnessy Naughton, president of the left-leaning political action committee 314 Action, which aims to elect doctors to office, said she sees the order as “one more data point” in support of Democrats’ cause.
“Our organization and our candidates are certainly going to hammer that message home — that if you want healthcare that’s accessible and affordable, if you want medical advice that is science-based, we need to have accountability in Washington,” she said.
Trump has long called for shots spread out in separate visits
Trump’s doubt in the number and cadence of vaccines dates back at least to 2014, when he posted to social media the disproven claim that combination shots can cause autism and said if he were president he would spread them out.
While he’s since shown pride in his first-term Operation Warp Speed effort to disseminate COVID-19 vaccines quickly and praised certain other shots like the polio vaccine, he also has repeatedly called for reforming the childhood vaccine schedule. While his administration released an assessment comparing U.S. childhood vaccine schedules to peer nations’, several of his suggestions have come without any new scientific evidence.
“This is based on what I feel,” Trump said last September when he called for splitting the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine into three single-disease vaccines.
On Monday, he again pushed for separating the MMR shot into three, ordering the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to work on developing that option for children, since it doesn’t currently exist in the United States. Public health experts have warned that spacing out shots could increase the risk of infection with a vaccine-preventable disease before a child returns for the next visit.
Most Americans don’t see reevaluating vaccine safety as a top issue
Trump’s views have aligned him with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics.
The president credits Kennedy’s diverse coalition of MAHA followers — whose priorities range from regulating pesticides to ending vaccine mandates — with helping him win back the White House in 2024.
Even as the Trump administration has handed several wins to the MAHA coalition, including changing the federal dietary guidelines and loosening restrictions on peptides, some in the movement have grown impatient as their other priorities remain unfinished. It’s unclear whether Trump’s action to loosen vaccine recommendations, an issue some MAHA supporters are passionate about, will be enough to shore up those voters ahead of the midterms.
Franklin, who runs a conservative magazine, said she had talked with Trump about making vaccine recommendations more flexible at a MAHA roundtable earlier this year. She was pleased when the administration informed her that her requests were coming true.
“I think it just really shows he loves to hear from everyday Americans on how his policies and his administration affect the lives of people who are raising kids in this country,” she said.
But political strategists and Trump’s own pollster Tony Fabrizio have warned that efforts to shave down vaccine recommendations may not matter much to most voters this fall.
Polls show most Americans believe children should be vaccinated to attend school, though Republicans are less likely to see vaccines as important. And as rising prices on things like groceries, gas and healthcare tighten Americans’ budgets, many view the economy as a top issue they care about.
“Nothing in America matters more than affordability,” pollster Frank Luntz said. “And anytime the administration or Republicans goes off affordability, they’re not talking about what Americans really care about.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said with most Americans viewing vaccines positively, Trump’s announcement “does not strike me as the most persuasive political message.”
Recent polling from the healthcare research nonprofit KFF suggests that even among MAHA supporters, only 10% rank reevaluating vaccine safety as their top priority for the federal government. Higher-ranking priorities included lowering health costs (42%) and restricting chemical additives in the food supply (21%).
Democrats are seizing on Trump’s message
Asked about the timing of the order with the midterms approaching, a White House official who insisted on anonymity to brief reporters said that the move was a longstanding presidential priority and that other health issues voters care about were still being addressed.
To that effect, on the day Trump signed the order, the Food and Drug Administration announced an effort to require more transparency from food manufacturers about new ingredients or additives in foods — something many in the MAHA movement had been calling for.
The administration has also touted its efforts to lower drug prices and crack down on federal health program fraud, which it argues will save taxpayers money.
Still, Democratic candidates, including doctors linked to Naughton’s group 314 Action, seized on Trump’s order in messages to voters this week.
Dr. Richard Pan, a physician running as a Democrat for the U.S. House in Northern California, reposted the American Medical Association’s condemnation of Trump’s vaccine falsehoods, among other fact checks. He told The Associated Press he thinks voters are deciding between electing people who choose not to hold the administration accountable and those who “stand for the science.”
Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, pleaded with voters not to take health information from Trump in a video posted on Instagram in collaboration with the left-leaning Courier Newsroom.
“Do whatever you can to help elect scientists up and down the ballot in November, including sending me to the U.S. Senate,” she said to the camera. “I cannot think of a more urgent time for us to have a pediatrician in the room where these conversations are happening.”