Exclusives

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

[Flickr/Asian Development Bank, CC BY 2.0]

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.

“For a long … and far too long period of time, America has recommended more childhood vaccines than any peer nation and nearly twice as many doses as many European countries,” Trump said at a White House ceremony Monday afternoon. “In many cases we required 72 jabs for our healthy, lovely, delicate little children.”

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 1998 — 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 do not 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.”

Detailed polling conducted in October 2025 by Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio found that 73% of voters expressed concern about childhood vaccine mandates, while a whopping 90% of voters expressed concern about the pharmaceutical industry’s corrupting influence.

The Wall Street Journal reported on July 27 that Trump was turning up the heat on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do more on vaccines.

HHS first reported in a metaanalysis last year that America’s chockablock vaccination schedule was out of step with many other wealthy countries and recommended 11 critical vaccines for which broad international consensus exists.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) — the trade group for brand name pharmaceutical companies — was sharply critical of the policy.

“America’s childhood immunization schedule is built on decades of rigorous scientific research and public health expertise designed for the U.S. population. Any changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, vaccine formulations and ingredients should be driven by the same high standard of evidence and focused on protecting children from serious and potentially life-threatening diseases,” said PhRMA Chief Medical Officer Mike Ybarra in a statement.

“Simply imposing a narrower schedule by importing recommendations from foreign countries wouldn’t reflect gold standard science – it would mean accepting a lower bar of protection against diseases that remain serious and, in some cases, life-threatening for children in the United States,” Ybarra added.

In December 2025, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing his health department to align U.S. core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer, developed countries.

 And in May, President Trump signed an Executive Order realigning United States core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer, developed countries.

Internal documents from the maker of Tylenol and from the FDA show evidence was accumulating about a potential link between exposure to the drug in utero and neurological damage, the DCNF reported. Other studies have pointed to exposure to the drug in early childhood as problematic.

A 2017 survey shows that 64% of families administer Tylenol to treat side effects from childhood vaccines.