In a May 29 executive order, President Donald Trump directed the CDC to review and potentially update the U.S. childhood immunization schedule, reflecting HHS’ move earlier this year to pare back vaccine recommendations.
Five things to know:
1. About six months ago, President Trump instructed the CDC to compare vaccine recommendations in the U.S. and peer nations. On Jan. 5, HHS changed the U.S. childhood immunization schedule for the first time in decades, reducing routine immunizations from 17 to 11 diseases. About a dozen states sued HHS over the schedule change, and that case is continuing.
In a separate lawsuit, brought by the American Academy of Pediatricians, a federal judge blocked the HHS’ decision March 16. The judge ruled the unilateral change to the vaccine schedule bypassed the CDC’s own “longstanding practice of getting recommendations from [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] before changing the immunization schedules without sufficient explanation.”
2. Now, the Trump administration is again attempting to alter vaccine recommendations. The executive order instructs the ACIP to review HHS research of peer nation vaccine schedules. The review “should consider ways to provide maximum flexibility to parents and doctors through recommendations for timing and sequencing of the administration of routine immunizations,” the executive order said.
3. The “HHS scientific assessment found that the United States currently recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation, including more than twice as many vaccine doses as some European nations, and identified a set of consensus vaccines that are consistently recommended in all peer countries,” according to the order.
4. The American Medical Association’s president, Bobby Mukkamala, MD, said alterations to the schedule could erode trust in vaccines and raise the risk of preventable illness.
“There is no credible scientific evidence to support changing the current childhood vaccine schedule,” Dr. Mukkamala said in a May 30 statement. “That schedule is built on decades of rigorous research and real-world data, and it is designed to protect children in the U.S. when they are most vulnerable based on our nation’s disease burden.”
5. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been working to lead broad research into vaccine safety across federal health agencies, The New York Times reported May 12.
An HHS spokesperson told the Times that the effort reflects the administration’s commitment to “gold-standard vaccine research,” which was also cited in the May 29 executive order.
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