EXCLUSIVE: Trump To Sign Executive Order Calling For More Vaccine Flexibility And Research

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Monday aimed at increasing confidence in the childhood vaccination schedule through greater flexibility for families, according to a fact sheet obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Trump’s recommendations to align the childhood vaccination schedule with “gold standard science” involves three policies. White House officials told the DCNF the new executive order builds on the prior ones in large part because Trump himself will educate the public from the bully pulpit about the changes.

First, the order better educates states to harmonize their policies with a Health and Human Services (HHS) study finding that America’s 18-disease childhood vaccination schedule is more crowded than those in other high income nations in Europe and Asia. The order grants families greater allowance to space out childhood vaccines into separate medical visits and to separate the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three single-disease shots.

Second, the order calls on the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines — first created by a 1986 law but fallen into neglect in 1999 — to generate a report in 90 days on how to implement the EO, including ways the commercial sector can produce individual MMR shots and recommend research studies on how to optimally space out shots. The task force includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Third, the EO directs the Department of Justice to investigate where states are in violation of parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and religious and medical exemptions.

Other high income countries implement vaccine mandates but nevertheless enjoy high vaccination rates.

“By signing this executive order the president is helping Americans who are asking questions, especially post COVID, about vaccine requirements, and opening up a dialogue to encourage public trust,” a White House official said. “We are still recommending the measles and the polio vaccine.”

“On this topic in particular there’s been a lot of media misinformation and misreporting,” said another White House official. “If you read the EO there is nothing not grounded in data and gold standard science. We’re taking an evidence-based approach, but a lot of the reporting is not evidence-based.”