Mike the Mad Biologist

If you haven’t heard, the Trump administration, on Monday, announced an executive order that, in reality, would decrease the uptake of childhood vaccines. Among other things, it calls for breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate shots–even though there is no manufacture of single shot measles, mumps, or rubella vaccines–along with administering each vaccination at a different medical appointment. The unannounced goal is to make it harder for parents and kids to find the time for vaccination; it also would overwhelm doctors’ offices, and, to the extent there would be co-pays, will cost parents more. The order also calls for ending administration of influenza and COVID vaccines to children.

All of this is in service to the debunked hypothesis that childhood vaccines cause autism. At the same time, the U.S. is experiencing its largest outbreak of measles in decades.

Some people have been pointing out that this is an executive order, and therefore we should calm down. Trump has been stymied in the courts over similar attempts, states are adopting pre-Trump CDC guidelines and so on. So Trump and his minions won’t be able to do as much damage as they would like.

But The Discourse™, thanks to the Fauci hearings, spent a couple of weeks arguing about how Fauci’s and others’ statements during the pandemic might have undermined confidence in public health. But compared to that, this executive order is a deliberate attempt to undermine one of the most successful public health interventions in history during the worst measles outbreak in years. To say the least, that too undermines confidence in public health.

We can hope–and if you’re not a resident of the mainland colony known as the District of Columbia, you can call your congressional representatives*–that this fails in terms of policy and politics.

*States are going to be really important in combating this, so call your state representatives too.