President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday giving American families greater flexibility over childhood vaccinations and demanding federal agencies align vaccine schedules with “gold standard science” used in other wealthy nations.
The order marks Trump’s boldest move yet on a issue that polling shows 73% of voters care deeply about — and it puts Big Pharma on notice.
“By signing this executive order the president is helping Americans who are asking questions, especially post COVID, about vaccine requirements, and opening up a dialogue to encourage public trust. We are still recommending the measles and the polio vaccine.”
The executive order implements three major policies, according to a fact sheet obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
First, the order directs states to allow families to space out childhood vaccines into separate medical visits — and to break up the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot into three individual vaccines. The move follows a Health and Human Services study finding that America’s 18-disease childhood vaccination schedule is more crowded than those in high-income European and Asian countries.
Second, Trump is reviving the HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines — created by a 1986 law but abandoned in 1999. The task force, which includes the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, has 90 days to report on how to implement the order, including how the private sector can produce individual MMR shots and recommend optimal spacing for childhood vaccines.
Third, the order directs the Department of Justice to investigate states violating parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and religious and medical exemptions for vaccines.
White House officials told the DCNF that Trump himself will use the bully pulpit to educate the public about the changes — a key escalation from prior vaccine policy moves.
A second White House official pushed back on media coverage of the order.
“On this topic in particular there’s been a lot of media misinformation and misreporting. If you read the EO there is nothing not grounded in data and gold standard science. We’re taking an evidence-based approach, but a lot of the reporting is not evidence-based.”
The move comes after detailed polling conducted in October 2025 by Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio found that 73% of voters expressed concern about childhood vaccine mandates, while a whopping 90% of voters expressed concern about the pharmaceutical industry’s corrupting influence.
The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Trump was turning up the heat on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to do more on vaccines.
HHS reported in a metaanalysis last year that America’s packed vaccination schedule was out of step with many other wealthy countries and recommended 11 core vaccines for which broad international consensus exists.
In December 2025, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing his health department to align U.S. core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer developed countries. In May, he signed a follow-up executive order taking the same approach.
SCOOP: Trump To Sign Executive Order Calling For More Vaccine Flexibility And Research
Trump will use the bully pulpit to pivot to gold standard science on vaccines this afternoon, according to a fact sheet I obtained. https://t.co/XkGCqDGacP
— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) August 10, 2026
Internal documents from the maker of Tylenol and from the FDA show evidence was accumulating about a potential link between exposure to the drug in utero and neurological damage, the DCNF reported. Other studies have pointed to exposure to the drug in early childhood as problematic.
A 2017 survey shows that 64% of families administer Tylenol to treat side effects from childhood vaccines.
