Trump Signs Executive Order To Reduce The Number of Mandated Childhood Vaccines

Earlier this week (being the week of August 17th 2026), President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for sweeping changes to U.S. vaccine policy, including reducing the number of diseases for which kids receive routine childhood vaccines from 18 to 11.

The executive order also recommends splitting the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine into three shots, delivered separately over 18 months.

The executive order recognizes “Gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only ‌11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR, which hopefully will be split up,” Trump said during a signing ceremony at the White House on Monday, where he was joined by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The executive order also ends administration of the birth dose of the hepatitis B shot, matching a recommendation made last year by a CDC advisory committee.

Vaccinations no longer recommended for children are now subject to a recommendation for shared clinical decision-making between physicians and caregivers.

Trump added that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood vaccination schedule recommends, “More childhood vaccines than any peer nation, and even twice as many doses as some European countries. We’re reducing them, we’re changing it to visits over the period of a year, a year and a half, so they get 20% of what they would have gotten in one big shot.”

The order also:

• Requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) long-dormant Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to draft a report within 90 days on how to implement the executive order. The Task Force was reinstated in August 2025 after attorney Ray Flores sued HHS. Children’s Health Defence (CHD) funded the lawsuit.
• Calls on states to harmonize their policies with an HHS study showing that the current 18-disease childhood vaccination schedule requires more vaccinations than other high-income countries in Europe and Asia. States are asked to consider updating their school vaccination laws to reflect the new recommendations.
• Advises federal agencies to advance the recommendations based on their respective authorities, to ensure the public has the best scientific information.
• Directs the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate states that may be violating parental rights and religious freedom, including disability accommodations, and religious and medical exemptions for childhood vaccinations.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., the Chief Scientific Officer for Children’s Health Defence, called the order “a step in the right direction,” and went on to explain that, “by eliminating the birth Hep B and the new RSV jab from the ‘recommended’ schedule, vaccination is delayed to 2 months of age, rather than the first day of life. Infant deaths in the U.S. peak during the first week of life and anything that can be done to address that will help drive mortality rates lower,”

According to Dr. Robert Malone, who was appointed last year by Robert F. Kennedy to be one of the new members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the executive order will likely result in broader changes to the entire vaccine schedule.

“This is going to establish essentially a new vaccine schedule that is fully informed by the research and data that we have from HHS and NIH and other aspects of the government,” Malone wrote in a Substack post.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, The World Council for Health issued their own statement on this recent development, saying:

“This marks a significant federal acknowledgment that the United States childhood vaccine schedule, as it has existed for decades, was not built on the rigorous scientific foundation the public was led to believe. The order recommends separating the combined Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine into three single-disease shots (as suggested by Dr Andrew Wakefield in 1998).

The combined MMR is the flagship product of the childhood vaccine schedule. Splitting it apart is an admission that the way we’ve been vaccinating children for decades was never properly safety-tested for the combination. If the MMR is being separated, parents are legitimately going to question other vaccines. Could this be the start of the great unravelling of the vaccine thread?

We are not naive. The forces that protected the vaccine schedule for decades, billions of dollars in revenue, reputations, careers, and ideology will not surrender quietly.

However, this is a turning point that cannot be ignored. Parents were right to be concerned, the schedule was too aggressive, and informed consent should govern medical decisions for us all but particularly our children.”

At Canada Health Alliance we see this as a very positive development and one which will hopefully, sooner than later, result in a reduction to the number of vaccines young Canadians have to face in the first days, months and years of their delicate and vulnerable lives.

We would also like to make you aware of a new, recently published study in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science that finds that infant mortality is HIGHER in developed countries that require more doses of newborn vaccines. The link to this very interesting (and consequently suppressed) study is as follows: https://www.cureus.com/articles/164423-neonatal-infant-and-under-age-five-vaccine-doses-

We would like to thank The World Council for Health and Children’s Health Defence for the bulk of this article. The Children’s Health Defence portion was published in their Defender newsletter on Tuesday. We would also like to acknowledge Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. who wrote the original article. You can read the full original article in the Defender at: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/trump-signs-executive-order-reduce-number-childhood-vaccines/