President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday afternoon that would upend the childhood vaccine schedule, a longtime goal of the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement.

The executive order recommends reducing the amount of immunizations kids receive to provide protection for 11 diseases, down from the 18 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had previously recommended. The immunizations that were reduced will remain available for certain high-risk groups and “for shared clinical decision-making, ensuring that parents have all options available to them,” according to the order. Those include the hepatitis A and B vaccines, and the Covid-19 and flu vaccines.

It also recommends separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella, also known as MMR, vaccine into three individual shots, along with generally administering vaccines during separate visits “to give parents more options regarding the timing and frequency of this vaccine administration.”

The CDC web page characterizes the combined MMR vaccine as “very safe” and says there is “no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.” A discredited claim, popular among MAHA adherents, is that vaccines cause autism.

But Trump on Monday said, with no evidence, that the combined vaccine is “lethal” and that the combination of vaccines “can be explosive.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the de facto leader of the MAHA movement and a longtime vaccine skeptic, was at the signing in the Oval Office on Monday.

The executive order also directs the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines to present plans to the the president on how “to improve vaccine research and options for American parents, including continuous evaluation of the risk and benefit profiles of all childhood vaccines based on U.S. and international data.”

At the signing, Trump said the executive order also directs newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche “to advance legal challenges against states that violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions for the exemptions.”

The order argues that the changes will “maximize parental choices over vaccinations for their children.”

While signing the executive order, Trump appeared to suggest, with no evidence, that vaccines cause autism, saying that “there’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism.” He subsequently walked that back, adding, “Well, we do not know exactly what the cause is with respect to autism. It is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world.”

The president also cast the executive order as more or less an experiment that could potentially be reversed.

“Nothing bad can happen” by making the changes, he said. “It’s possible it doesn’t work. I don’t think that’s much of a possibility. Frankly, we’re going to learn a lot.”

But the order has already drawn pushback.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician and the chair of the Senate Health Committee, called the executive order “wrong” in a post on X on Monday afternoon.

“The President does not have the expertise to make these changes,” he added.

“Breaking up vaccines will mean children have to get more shots to get the same protection, not fewer shots. It will increase hesitancy and make children less safe,” Cassidy said. “Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order. This is so wrong.”

The American College of Physicians, a national organization of internal medicine physicians, called the executive order “part of a troubling pattern by the administration to attempt to unilaterally change vaccine guidance, particularly for children, rather than relying on the transparent, scientific review that has guided the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule for decades.”

The statement added, “If implemented, the changes could increase costs to patients and families, including additional copays while also placing a greater burden on families needing to schedule multiple appointments for a multiple-dose MMR vaccine.”

Trump, Kennedy and MAHA supporters have a long history of making baseless claims about the causes of autism. Last year, Trump also cited, to the dismay of scientists and physicians’ groups, that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was to blame for autism.

Health officials first announced in January plans to reduce the recommended number of vaccines for children and babies. In doing so, they bypassed a CDC committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, designed to make those decisions. But those recommendations have been largely ignored by medical associations and many states as they remain tied up in court. The CDC does not mandate state policies on childhood vaccines, but its recommendations carry great weight with local health officials.

The executive order comes just a few weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was pushing Kennedy to do more to investigate any possible connections between vaccines and autism — even though White House officials had previously told the HHS secretary to tone down his vaccine skepticism ahead of the midterm elections, the newspaper reported.

Brandy Zadrozny contributed to this report.

CORRECTION (Aug. 10, 2026, 5:30 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated how a new executive order might change America’s childhood vaccine schedule. The executive order recommends taking seven vaccines off the childhood vaccine schedule, but it still recommends certain high-risk groups receive the reduced immunizations.

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