U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Monday "calling for more vaccine flexibility and research," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X.
The order will call for fewer childhood vaccinations, splitting the childhood measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three shots and delivering the shots at separate medical visits.
Trump is issuing this order months after trying to slash the childhood vaccine schedule from 18 to 11. That move was blocked by a judge in March.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a long history of linking vaccines to autism, announced in January, that the HHS would revise its childhood immunization schedule, slashing the number of diseases children
are vaccinated against from 18 to 11.
At the time, public health experts said these changes were at the expense of children's health, like Dr. Andrew D. Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who said the changes are "dangerous and unnecessary,” in a statement shared on Jan. 6.
Kennedy did that after removing all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's expert vaccine panel and filled many of the positions with people who have been vaccine skeptics or questioned COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
In March, a federal judge blocked the vaccine schedule changes, saying proper scientific procedures had not been followed, and also suspended 13 new members appointed by Kennedy to the CDC vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) and voided their prior votes.
In addition to votes on the hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccines, the ACIP voted to no longer recommend the MMRV vaccine, a combination vaccine that targets measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) for children younger than 4.
Two months later, Trump signed an executive order directing federal health agencies to review and align the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with recommendations from peer developed nations.
This story is developing.
Contributing: Reuters
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump to sign order calling for fewer childhood vaccines and 'more vaccine flexibility'
