Trump’s War on Vaccines
A living record of the president who brought the anti-vaccine movement into power
By Erik Gauger · Updated October 10, 2026
Long before he ran for office, Donald Trump was telling millions of people that vaccines cause autism. No president has done more to undermine vaccines, and no American in public life has done more to carry the anti-vaccine movement from the fringe into the federal government.
He spread the autism myth on Twitter for years, then repeated it on a presidential debate stage. Days before his first inauguration, he invited Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country's best-known vaccine critic, to lead a commission on vaccine safety. In his second term he made Kennedy the secretary of Health and Human Services, and Kennedy has spent the time since dismantling the system that kept American children safe from diseases most doctors had never seen.
Measles, declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, has come back. Children are dying of it again. This page records what Trump said, what his administration did, and what followed, and it is updated as the evidence arrives. Each entry says whether its harm is counted, meaning documented deaths and illnesses, or projected, meaning harm expected but not yet measured.
On standards. This is not a partisan record: the same evidentiary rules apply whatever the politics of the victim or the perpetrator. Every entry links to court records, government data, published research or established news reporting, documented actions are kept apart from alleged motives, and recorded deaths apart from estimates. How this record is kept
The record, latest first
The count so far
Counted: 5 to 8 Americans dead of measles since 2025 (3 in 2025; in 2026, 2 confirmed by the CDC and 5 reported by states). More than 6,100 measles cases in under two years: 2,288 in 2025 and 3,887 in 2026 through October 1, the worst year in decades, with 42 separate outbreaks.
Projected: the long-term cost of a gutted vaccine advisory system, a shrunken childhood schedule, canceled mRNA research and lower vaccination rates. Not yet measured, and not added to the toll.
Measles deaths return to Pennsylvania for the first time in 35 years
August–October 2026 · Outbreak deaths
Pennsylvania. Two unvaccinated people died of measles in Lancaster County in August, the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. On September 12, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County. Another unvaccinated Lancaster County resident died after testing positive, the fifth measles-related death reported in 2026. As of late September the CDC had confirmed two of them. By October 1 the country had recorded 3,887 cases in 2026, far more than all of 2025, in 42 separate outbreaks. In November, a regional commission of the Pan American Health Organization decides whether the United States has lost the measles elimination status it held since 2000. An analysis in The Lancet found the country already fails most of the criteria.
Total Dead: 2–5 (Counted: 2 confirmed by the CDC, 5 reported)
Sources: AFP via VnExpress; Reuters via GV Wire; CIDRAP; Contagion Live, Oct. 2; Reuters via KSL.
Trump signs an order to split the measles vaccine
August 10, 2026 · His administration's policy
The White House. With measles spreading in 45 states and children dying of it again, Trump signed an executive order telling parents to give childhood vaccines one at a time, at separate visits, and to split the measles, mumps and rubella shot into three. No such single vaccines are sold in the United States; Merck stopped supplying them in 2008, and developing new ones would take years. The order gives HHS 90 days to plan for them, urges states to reconsider their school vaccine requirements, and directs the attorney general to go after state laws that limit religious and medical exemptions. Public health experts warn that more visits mean more missed appointments, and more unprotected children.
Sources: Axios; Medical Economics; Gray News via WLOX.
The childhood vaccine schedule cut from 18 diseases to 11
January 5, 2026 · His administration's policy
Washington, D.C.. Following a December memo from Trump, HHS released a new childhood schedule that stopped universally recommending vaccines against RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza and meningococcal disease. The change skipped the public review the law requires. It leaned on an assessment of other countries' schedules written by two vaccine skeptics. On March 16, after the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups sued, a federal court in Massachusetts paused the new schedule, Kennedy's overhaul of the advisory committee, and its votes, including the hepatitis B decision.
Sources: Georgetown Center for Children and Families; HealthDay via Powers Health; Bloomberg Law.
Kennedy's committee ends the hepatitis B shot for every newborn
December 5, 2025 · His administration's policy
Atlanta. The reconstituted committee voted to drop the universal recommendation of a hepatitis B vaccine at birth, a policy credited with nearly eliminating the disease among American children, in favor of individual decision-making for babies whose mothers test negative.
Sources: Manatt Health; HHS.
The CDC's website now says vaccines might cause autism
November 2025 · His administration's policy
Atlanta. At Kennedy's direction, the CDC rewrote its vaccine-safety page to say that the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not evidence-based, reversing a scientific conclusion backed by decades of research involving millions of children. The country's leading public-health agency now publishes the central myth of the anti-vaccine movement.
Sources: PBS NewsHour; HPN Online.
The president tells parents to break up their babies' vaccines
September 22, 2025 · His words
The White House. At a press conference on autism, Trump told parents that babies should not get the hepatitis B vaccine until age 12, that the measles, mumps and rubella shot should be split into three, and that they should not let doctors give their baby the largest pile of stuff you've ever seen. He called for reexamining a link between vaccines and autism. Dozens of medical, research and autism groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, condemned the advice. No separate measles, mumps or rubella vaccine has been sold in the United States since Merck stopped supplying them in 2008, so a parent who follows his advice has nothing to give a child but delay.
Sources: Reuters via GV Wire; PBS NewsHour; White House transcript (govinfo).
Nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research canceled
August 5, 2025 · His administration's policy
Washington, D.C.. HHS wound down 22 mRNA vaccine projects funded through BARDA, the agency that prepares the country for pandemics, canceling close to $500 million in work. The technology behind the COVID vaccines, credited with saving millions of lives, was abandoned by the government that paid to develop it.
Sources: Columbia Law School, Sabin Center; Bloomberg Government; CBS News.
Kennedy fires every member of the nation's vaccine advisory committee
June 9, 2025 · His administration's policy
Washington, D.C.. Kennedy removed all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the independent panel that has guided American vaccine policy for six decades, and replaced them with his own picks, several of them vaccine skeptics. The new committee went on to unwind recommendations the old one had built over decades.
Sources: Reuters via Malay Mail; CBC; Sen. Sanders letter to Sen. Cassidy.
COVID shots dropped for healthy children and pregnant women
May 27, 2025 · His administration's policy
Washington, D.C.. Kennedy announced in a video on social media that the CDC would no longer recommend COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women, bypassing the agency's own expert review. Later that year, the FDA limited approval of the new shots to older and high-risk Americans.
Sources: AP via Anchorage Daily News; Healio.
Measles kills Americans for the first time in a decade
February–April 2025 · Outbreak deaths
West Texas and New Mexico. A measles outbreak that began in West Texas killed two unvaccinated school-age girls, one in February and one in April, and an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. They were the first measles deaths in the United States since 2015. As the outbreak grew, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong vaccine critic, sent mixed messages: he called vaccination a personal choice and promoted vitamin A and other treatments, while doctors pleaded with parents to vaccinate. The outbreak spread from two imported cases to 45 states.
Total Dead: 3 (Counted)
Sources: CIDRAP; NPR via WAMC; CIDRAP (outbreak spread).
An executive order against schools that require COVID vaccines
February 14, 2025 · His administration's policy
The White House. Trump kept his campaign promise in narrower form, ordering the Education Department and HHS to find and cut federal grants to schools and colleges that required students to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Sources: AP via News4JAX.
Trump picks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the nation's health agencies
November 14, 2024 · His administration's policy
Palm Beach, Florida. Trump named Kennedy, who had spent two decades spreading the claim that vaccines cause autism and leading the country's largest anti-vaccine organization, to be secretary of Health and Human Services, putting him over the CDC, the FDA and the NIH. The Senate confirmed him in February 2025. Every policy entry on this page follows from that choice.
Sources: Gray News via WJHG; HPN.
“Not one penny” for schools with vaccine mandates
June 22, 2024 · His words
Faith and Freedom Coalition, Washington, D.C.. Campaigning for a second term, Trump promised not to give one penny to any school with a vaccine or mask mandate, and to sign the order on his first day. His campaign first said he meant COVID mandates, then would not say. Every state requires vaccines against measles, polio and other childhood diseases for school attendance; a promise to defund schools over vaccine mandates puts all of them in question.
Sources: PBS NewsHour.
Operation Warp Speed, and how fast he walked away from it
May 2020 – December 2021 · His administration's policy
Washington, D.C. and Dallas. Trump's administration funded Operation Warp Speed, which helped bring COVID vaccines to Americans within a year, and he took credit for it. But when he told a Dallas crowd in December 2021 that he had gotten his booster, some in the audience booed, and he stopped pressing the point. Rather than lead his supporters toward the vaccines his own government had paid for, he followed them away. By his second term he was signing an order against schools that required COVID shots, and his health secretary was canceling the mRNA research that made the vaccines possible.
Sources: FOX 13 (Dallas, Dec. 19, 2021).
“They have to get their shots”: the one time Trump said it plainly
April 26, 2019 · His words
The White House. During the worst measles year in a quarter century, a reporter asked the president about vaccines. For once he was clear: people have to get their shots. It shows that Trump knew what the right answer was. He has rarely given it since.
Sources: Axios; Washington Times.
Trump asks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead a vaccine safety commission
January 10, 2017 · His administration's policy
Trump Tower, New York. After meeting the president-elect, Kennedy told reporters that Trump had asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety, and that he had agreed. Trump's spokeswoman said only that no decision had been made. The American Academy of Pediatrics answered that vaccines are the most significant medical innovation of our time. The commission never formed in the first term. Eight years later, Trump gave Kennedy far more than a commission.
Sources: AP via PBS NewsHour; Healio.
On the debate stage: an employee's baby “is now autistic”
September 16, 2015 · His words
Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California. At the second Republican debate, watched by more than 20 million people, Trump told the story of an employee's two-year-old who got a vaccine, got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, and was now autistic. He called autism an epidemic and said vaccines should be spread out over time. Two doctors stood on the stage beside him. Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, said the research showed no link to autism, then agreed that children may be getting too many vaccines too close together. Rand Paul said he favored vaccines but would spread them out. Trump's story went out to the country largely unchallenged.
Sources: CBS News fact check; Fox News fact check; Debate transcript excerpts.
“Many such cases”: Trump tells his followers vaccines cause autism
March 28 and September 4, 2014 · His words
Twitter. Years before he ran for president, Trump used Twitter to push the claim that vaccines cause autism. In March 2014 he described a healthy child who goes to the doctor, gets “pumped with massive shot of many vaccines,” and changes, ending with one word: autism. In September he wrote that he was against vaccines given in one massive dose. These were not stray remarks; he returned to the theme again and again, to an audience of millions. The claim had been studied and disproven many times over by then.
Sources: Ballotpedia; National Review.
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