Trump Is the Real Vaccine Skeptic in His Administration

By Grayson Logue

Monday, August 10, 2026

 

President Donald Trump held his most recent televised Cabinet meeting at Camp David last month, going around the room to hear updates from department secretaries on various policy fronts. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s turn to speak came, he talked up the progress the administration had made on drug pricing policies. The president nodded along, but after his health and human services secretary finished, he inquired about progress on another issue. “How are you doing on the autism research? Because that’s so important,” Trump asked. “We will have an answer for you,” Kennedy replied.

 

“We’ll be talking about that—we’ll be having something of interest,” Trump added.   

 

Much scrutiny and reporting has rightfully focused on how Kennedy has used his position at the Department of Health and Human Services to promote vaccine skepticism and to try to roll back long-standing immunization recommendations. But the man who tapped Kennedy for the post has long maintained his own strain of vaccine skepticism, which seems to have reemerged in recent weeks as a force driving policy.

 

The Cabinet meeting exchange followed reporting from the Wall Street Journal a few days earlier that Trump had begun pressuring Kennedy to do more to try to establish a connection between vaccines and autism—numerous studies over decades have found no link—as well as reduce the number of vaccines that children receive, and the secretary appeared to confirm the reporting in an interview with CNN earlier this month. During a May meeting at one of his golf courses, Trump reportedly ribbed Kennedy for the lack of progress on eliminating vaccines, telling him that he had the yips. Last Thursday, several media outlets reported that the White House is preparing a new executive order on childhood vaccines and autism, though the details are not yet clear.

 

Throughout last year, Kennedy appeared to have free rein to pursue his own anti-vaccine agenda, and at times, Trump joined in the effort, including last September when the president went even further than Kennedy in misrepresenting the science around possible associations between Tylenol taken during pregnancy and autism. The president also endorsed Kennedy’s effort in January to unilaterally rewrite the childhood vaccine schedule under the guise of mirroring other peer nations’ recommendations. The resulting cuts to routine vaccine recommendations did not, in fact, approximate other peer countries.

 

But by the beginning of this year, senior advisers in the White House had reportedly put the brakes on Kennedy’s efforts, worried about polling showing that vaccine skepticism would hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. A court decision in March froze the changes to vaccine recommendations and the childhood shot schedule that Kennedy had carried out unilaterally and pushed through an advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Throughout the spring, Kennedy largely stopped talking about vaccine issues in public and emphasized less controversial aspects of his MAHA agenda like healthy eating, even launching his own cooking show.   

 

Trump’s reengagement on issues related to vaccines suggests that attempts to restrain Kennedy came from White House staff but not the president. In late May, the same month Trump reportedly started pressuring Kennedy on vaccines, the president issued an executive order taking another swing at the peer-country shift that the court had put on hold for failing to consult the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In December, the president issued a brief presidential memorandum directing Kennedy to align the childhood schedule with peer-countries’ recommendations. The May order seemed structured to provide a more solid legal footing for the administration to make a second attempt at cutting the number of routine vaccine recommendations.

 

The president is not as broadly anti-vaccine as Kennedy and often says he’s generally supportive of vaccines, particularly the polio vaccine—an immunization the HHS secretary has falsely claimed killed more people than the disease itself. “No, I believe in vaccines,” Trump said in a May interview. “But I don’t believe you have to have a mandate for all of them. The polio vaccine [is] amazing, you know—wiped it out.”

 

But Trump has maintained for decades that the concentration and total number of vaccines recommended for children are unnecessary and cause autism. In that same May interview, Trump detailed his feelings:

 

I believe in vaccines, but I think we’re up to 88 vaccines, and I really feel that vaccines, if they were given in smaller quantities. …  They want to cut some out, and that’s good too, I agree with that. Eighty-two is too many. If you look at Denmark and other countries, you have 12, 14, I think 17, and we have like 82. But I look at these beautiful little babies and they get like a vat, a big glass of stuff pumped into their bodies, and I think it’s a very negative thing to do.

 

He added that his beliefs are independent of Kennedy’s vaccine views: “I’m not doing that in terms of Bobby or not. I hope they agree with that, but that’s just my opinion. I would love to see much smaller shots, like four visits to the doctor, and I think you would have a much better result with the autism.”

 

Trump incorrectly conflated the number of diseases targeted by routine immunization—18 in the U.S.—with the total number of vaccine doses a child is recommended to receive in the first 18 years of life. The White House has promoted the false claim that the U.S. vaccine schedule recommends that babies receive 72 injections. You can arrive at that number by totaling doses—getting a COVID and flu shot every year until age 18 accounts for half of that total—but not injections, since some vaccines are delivered via combination shots. None of the peer countries highlighted by the administration, including Denmark, recommend fewer than 30 total doses. Public health observers have argued that fearmongering about injections harming babies has contributed to a decline in infants receiving vitamin K shots at birth. Those injections are not vaccines and are administered to eliminate the risk of severe bleeding from vitamin K deficiency.

 

What’s more, the number of diseases protected against by the childhood schedule has increased over the decades, but improvements in vaccine technology have resulted in a significant decrease in the number of proteins and molecules, known as antigens, required to trigger a sufficient immune response. Put simply, today’s shots are easier on the immune system. The entire modern vaccine schedule includes a total of 165 antigens, lower than the number in a single vaccine of previous eras. For comparison, babies and young children encounter anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 antigens in their natural environments every day.

 

A mountain of studies has failed to establish a link between childhood vaccines and autism, or the idea that combination shots like the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine cause autism. A study published last month examined a cohort of 2.5 million American children and found that receiving an MMR vaccine dose before age 2 had no association with autism.

 

The idea of spreading out the vaccines a child receives has gained acceptance among some parents because it sounds intuitively safer, even though the scientific data indicate that delaying immunizations increases the risks of a child contracting potentially harmful diseases. It’s also the kind of gut, intuitive belief that Trump is known for, not unlike his belief that tariffs benefit the U.S. economy. As far back as 2007, Trump promoted the belief that the quantity of injections caused autism. “When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” he said. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve [been] giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

 

In 2014, he posted on social media, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!” He also wrote at the time, “If I were President I would push for proper vaccinations but would not allow one time massive shots that a small child cannot take - AUTISM.”

 

While Kennedy has been the face of the modern anti-vaccine movement, the vaccine skepticism flowing from the administration is not simply the result of Trump installing an attorney whose career centered on suing vaccine manufacturers as the federal government’s top health official. It’s also emanating from the president’s proclivities and his insistence on risking the country’s health in an attempt to validate his personal opinions.