IT WAS ARGUABLY one of the most surreal scenes ever broadcast from the Oval Office – and there’s plenty of competition for that accolade. Trump, catatonic, slumped to one side with his eyes closed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, standing to his left, reading incomprehensible gibberish from a sheaf of papers, hands trembling and body twitching.

On Trump’s right side, an unidentified female, expressionless and motionless, except for some bizarre arm movements; more malfunctioning humanoid flight attendant than actual human.

Hardly a trio that would inspire confidence in their collective understanding of epidemiology. Frankenstein’s monster would have made for a more compelling advocate for Trump’s “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations.”

Trump’s vaccine makeover, launched atop a fire hose of lies and falsehoods about the dangers of the current schedule, ran the gamut from the bewildering to the demented. Aside from baseless attempts to link vaccines to autism, it included hair-raising claims of children being subjected to 72 individual injections, with each shot pumping more than half a litre of vaccine into their arms.

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Even more implausible was Trump’s claim that he personally took each of his five children for five separate doctor’s visits so that they could each receive bite-sized, monovalent doses of the MMR vaccines.

The executive order directs MMR vaccine manufacturers of MMR to start producing single vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, which would be administered separately, instead of the current multivalent format and removes Hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, flu and Covid-19 from the recommended list of 18 vaccines.

It demands that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revise its recommendations accordingly, presenting Erica Schwarz, its newly appointed director, with the sort of dilemma she could do without in her first week on the job. Schwarz was confirmed by the Senate last week on foot of her promise to ‘never betray the science’ on which CDC policies are based. Good luck with that.

And it directs Todd Blanche, the confirmed-by-the-skin-of-teeth Attorney General, to “pursue cases against states…. whose immunisation rules contradict “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal........

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