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Trump Is Trying to Sabotage the Health of All Our Kids

His executive order on vaccines is classic Trump: authoritarian, nonsensical, and deadly.

Donald Trump signs an executive order about vaccines on August 10, 2026.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended both to reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and to make it harder for them to get those vaccines.

Trump declared that kids didn’t need to be routinely vaccinated against Hepatitis A and B, or against meningitis—all diseases that can prove life-altering or even lethal. And he targeted the MMR vaccine, which in one shot protects children from mumps, measles, and rubella, and has been spectacularly successful over the decades in reducing childhood mortality rates.

Referring to repeatedly debunked theories that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to push, Trump claimed that multi-vaccine shots like the MMR jab trigger autism, and that separating them out would potentially save millions of lives. He also claimed, bizarrely, that these all-in-one inoculations injected soda can–size amounts of liquid into children; in reality, each shot contains a fraction of a tablespoonful of serum.

As happens so often these days, legal experts immediately pointed out that Trump’s decree wouldn’t really carry the force of law, as vaccine policies are mostly determined at the state rather than the federal level, and any changes to vaccine mandates will likely trigger long and bitter legal battles. In other words, this was dismissible as simply routine Trumpian bluster.

But that largely misses the point. Trump sabotages public policy not through careful legal or legislative strategies but by flooding the zone with his gibberish. When he claims that he knows more than the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society, and all the other specialist networks that have come out against his proposed vaccination changes, he is deliberately creating enough white noise to further undermine consensus........

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