President Donald Trump is hailing his new order on vaccines as a win for freedom of choice in children's future medical care but critics are slamming the move, saying it could lead to greater risk of diseases rarely seen for generations.
Trump signed an executive order Monday, Aug. 10, aimed at giving Americans more choice in terms of what vaccines their children take, according to the White House. The order aims to decrease the number of vaccines children take and split vaccines that have been administered in a single shot into several split across separate doctor’s visits.
"Nothing bad can happen from what we're doing," Trump said. "It's possible it doesn't work. I don't think that's much of a possibility, frankly. We're going to learn a lot."
Critics, including elected Republican Party officials, are slamming the new White House policy, saying it will make children less safe and will add healthcare costs for parents.
U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and physician, blasted Trump's order. The White House directives, he said, trade on the claim unsupported by science that vaccines are harmful and cause autism.
"Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order," Cassidy said in a statement on his official X page. "This is so wrong."
Health experts also sharply criticized the plan.
"This upends decades of public health practice and consensus and it’s been done unilaterally without reason and without evidence," Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, told USA TODAY.
He added: "Childhood vaccines have been the greatest public health achievements in our lifetimes and they have the best track record of any medical intervention for safety and effectiveness and by reducing the number of vaccines and also requiring many additional doctor’s visits, it’s going to open up even wider gaps in immunization coverage among children."
Gostin predicted that major outbreaks of measles, mumps, rubella and other childhood diseases are inevitable and that some children will die.
Trump’s new "Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans" is the White House’s latest effort to change the landscape in vaccines across the country. Previous administration efforts have been blocked in court.
The president told reporters in the Oval Office on Aug. 10 that the order comes in response to claims that some vaccines are "quite lethal" and "explosive" when taken together, though he said he does not have evidence to support such claims.
Trump said the order does not force parents to limit vaccinations.
"Parents can still choose to give their children all of the vaccinations if they wish," Trump said on Aug. 10 before signing the order. "They will be covered by insurance."
What does Trump’s order call for?
The White House’s new executive order "Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans" urges U.S. states and territories to follow a new blueprint for administering vaccines that would upend decades of public health practice.
Trump’s order generally aims to lower the number of vaccines children take by recommending shots be administered in separate visits, by narrowing the number of people to whom the White House recommends for some vaccines and by offering support to parents who don’t want their children to be vaccinated.
Among the recommendations, Trump’s order calls for separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into separate shots that would be administered across several doctor’s visits. The combination shot is widely known as the MMR vaccine.
White House officials did not have an immediate answer on how federal officials would address rising medical bills resulting from additional doctor’s visits. Trump earlier promised that vaccines would remain covered by insurance.
Health experts prefer combination formulations, including the MMR vaccine, because they target more than one pathogen, require fewer shots and research shows patients are more likely to complete recommended vaccine series when fewer shots are involved.
It’s unclear how soon the MMR separation recommendation could be implemented. The combination shot has been administered since 1971 and most vaccine makers manufacture the shot as a combination, not as individual vaccines.
According to the new order, the Department of Justice will also support parents aiming to challenge in court existing public standards. White House officials said the order aims to "maximize parental choice."
What does the order do?
The White House’s order has no binding effect as law and should not be taken as a change in federal vaccine policy.
According to experts, changing federal vaccine recommendations is a rigorous process based upon reviews of evidence.
The Trump administration’s order better serves as a blueprint for states and territories to adopt. But given the president’s sway in Republican-led states, the order is expected to have a potentially broad impact, especially as the number of unvaccinated children traveling around the country rises.
"None of it [is] based in science," Peter J. Hotez, a vaccine pediatrician and scientist at Texas Medical Center, said of the White House order in a statement. "Measles has already returned, and we should expect congenital rubella syndrome to follow, pertussis also at risk, and even polio wouldn’t surprise me."
What impact could the order have on the spread of disease?
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, noted the White House’s recommendations come out amid ongoing measles and pertussis outbreaks. Pertussis is more commonly known as whooping cough.
"Did @SecKennedy not tell the president about the ongoing Trump/Kennedy measles and pertussis outbreaks, the deaths from them, and the fact that we will likely lose our measles elimination status on his watch?" said Reiss in a statement on X. "Someone should tell the President about that."
Measles was rare until 2025 when some 2,280 cases were seen across the country, according to Johns Hopkins. There have been nearly 2,500 cases so far in 2026. Almost all cases are reported among people who are unvaccinated or unknown to be vaccinated.
According to Johns Hopkins, 2025 saw the greatest number of whooping cough cases since 2012 with 29,000. The rising number of cases comes amid falling vaccination rates. Newborns and infants are particularly vulnerable to the disease.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump praises vaccine order but critics fear child deaths: What to know
