The White House is threatening yet another change to the childhood vaccine schedule in line with Secretary of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda.
On Friday, President Donald Trump teased plans to split some childhood immunizations into five separate shots, given as “20% doses” every six months, “so that a small amount of vaccine gets pumped into the body."
Trump suggested at an Oval Office event shared by Reuters that his administration could accomplish this by calling on vaccine makers directly to split up their shots.
The president said his proposed change to the vaccine schedule would lead to a “massive reduction in autism”, though the link between vaccines and autism is not backed by scientific evidence and has been repeatedly debunked by organizations like American Academy of Pediatrics.
Trump did not specify which vaccines his administration would consider divvying up. But vaccine expert Paul Offit, M.D., told CNN last week that the proposed changes would render the vaccines ineffective without making them any safer. Vaccines are already designed "to give the least amount of vaccine that induces an immune response that’s protective," he said.
Vaccine juggernaut Merck & Co. told Fierce in a statement that the company “remains committed to supporting immunization policies rooted in rigorous, evidence-based science and to strengthening the health of children, families and communities."
A company spokesperson added that vaccines "are considered one of the greatest public health achievements in modern history, and the evidence and science supporting their use is clear.”
Merck’s measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was already on the chopping block with the administration. In August, an executive order by the president called for the MMR vaccine to be broken into three individual vaccines, even though no such immunizations are currently approved in the U.S.
The same executive order also recommended the childhood vaccine schedule be trimmed down from 17 to 11 inoculations.
The president’s directives come after the HHS and Kennedy's original attempts to edit the vaccine schedule were held up in court earlier this year via a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics and others. In March, a Boston judge blocked significant parts of HHS' vaccine agenda, “finding that officials acted unlawfully in ushering in certain changes,” Fierce Pharma reported.
The ruling related in part to Kennedy's overhaul of the FDA's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel of outside experts that advises bodies like the CDC on vaccine policy, as well as CDC changes to the pediatric vaccine schedule initially unveiled in January.