Paul Offit’s Take on Trump’s Vaccine Order
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In this MedPage Today video, Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, responds to claims about childhood immunizations made by President Trump in his recent executive order on vaccines.
The following is a transcript of his remarks:
Offit: What Donald Trump said made about as much sense as when he said we all should drink bleach and expose ourselves to UV light to treat COVID. Maybe he’s not the guy to go to, to get the best medical information.
Trump: Effective immediately, my administration’s recognizing gold-standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella], which hopefully will be split up. You have the MMR, we want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR, we want to have separate — separate visits, separate times. The vaccine being broken into three separate single doses and vaccines being administered in separate visits.
Offit: So, here’s where this all comes from. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, published a paper in the journal The Lancet of eight children who had received the combination measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, and then within a month supposedly developed signs and symptoms of autism. Now, that paper was ultimately retracted.
Nonetheless, the day after he published that paper, Andrew Wakefield held a press conference and he said, “I think this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts to lessen the risk of autism.” And so when I was on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices between 1998 and 2003, we were asked to vote on whether or not this vaccine should be separated into its three component parts, which made no sense. I mean, if the vaccine doesn’t cause autism, then separating it into its three component parts won’t make it less likely to cause autism. We were forced to basically have that vote and we all unanimously voted no.
So, the first measles vaccine came into existence in the United States in 1963, the last best measles vaccine in ’68. The mumps vaccine came into existence in 1967, the first rubella vaccine in 1969. Those three vaccines were combined in 1971 and have been used safely for the last 50 years. We have an enormous amount of information showing that those single vaccines when given singly are no safer and no less effective than when you give the vaccine as a combination.
So the combination vaccine is safe, it’s effective, and it means children get two shots instead of six. This is an administration that constantly talks about giving fewer shots and then makes a recommendation to give more shots.
Trump: And I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.
Offit: Would love to see the proof that President Trump has of a bottle of soda being poured into a little child’s body. The standard dose of vaccine for children is 0.5 mL. That’s roughly a 10th of a teaspoon. If you look at a multi-dose vial, which would contain say 10 doses, that would be one teaspoon of fluid. A soda bottle contains about 2,000 mL, or said another way, it contains 4,000 doses of vaccine. What is he talking about?
I think the most amazing aspect of that particular press conference is that the media who was standing there listening to him didn’t all burst out laughing. It’s just a ridiculous thing to say. And if he says he has proof of it, great. Let’s see that proof.
Trump: Very importantly, vaccinations to hepatitis B, COVID-19, and influenza, among others, are no longer recommended for all children.
Offit: So, in January, beginning of January of 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out a schedule, which was a made-up schedule that was ultimately defeated by a federal court action in March of 2026. But in that schedule, RFK Jr. said that there were three vaccines that basically are optional, shared clinical decision-making. You could choose to get them or not choose to get them reasonably. And those were the influenza vaccine, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID vaccine, and the rotavirus vaccine.
Now there was another category, the so-called high-risk vaccine category, which President Trump alluded to there, which included the hepatitis A vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine, RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus, as a monoclonal antibody, and the meningococcal vaccines. Well, everyone is susceptible. I mean, there are arguably some high-risk groups, but everyone is susceptible to those diseases. That’s why everyone is routinely recommended to receive them.
A choice not to get those diseases is a choice to put your child at risk. That’s why they’re routinely recommended. I mean, who’s at high risk for hepatitis A? Anybody who ever eats at a restaurant. The notion that there’s a high-risk group is just absurd. In 1991, we, the United States, recommended a universal hepatitis B vaccine for every child born in this country. At the time in 1991, there were roughly 16,000 cases of hepatitis B in children less than 10 years of age.
This is an AIDS virus. This is a virus that can be transmitted relatively casually because it’s a virus that lives on surfaces for up to 7 days. So sharing towels, sharing washcloths, sharing toothbrushes, sharing razor blades, can put a child at risk of hepatitis B. Those other 8,000 children less than 10 who got hepatitis B from places other than their mother weren’t getting it because they were intravenous drug users. They weren’t getting it because they were sex workers. They were getting it because chronic hepatitis B infections are common in this country and it’s easy to come in contact with someone who could infect you.
Now, if you’re infected in the first year of life, if you’re infected while traveling through the birth canal of a mother who is infected, then you have a 90% chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.
So we dramatically decreased the incidence of hepatitis B in children less than 10, virtually eliminating it because of that recommendation more than 30 years ago. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to loosen the reins there to once again let hepatitis B back into a situation where it can cause cirrhosis, meaning chronic liver disease or liver cancers. It’s an incredibly unconscionable thing to do.
Trump: Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today in those times. People were much healthy and of course the high rates of autism now observed did not exist.
Offit: So, those were not the glory times. I’m not sure what he’s talking about when he’s saying that the incidence of autism has increased because of an increase in vaccines when that’s not true. The reason that the diagnosis of autism has increased is, most importantly, we’ve changed the definition. It’s now autism spectrum disorder, which includes a much wider spectrum of children. Two, we have better diagnostic tests.
It’s at least 80% genetic. Not all of it is heritable genetics. There are de novo or spontaneous mutations. There are factors associated with maternal health, with maternal infections during pregnancy, with maternal drugs taken during pregnancy that increase the risk of autism. But you don’t hear about any of that because people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump have taken the autism story hostage to support their own false beliefs — false, immutable, science-resistant beliefs — that vaccines are the cause.
That is the single best studied environmental influence on autism and it’s not it. So why are we still spending money on this fruitless dead-end hypothesis? We could be spending money on far more promising leads. By doing what RFK Jr. and President Trump are doing, by taking autism hostage for their own anti-vaccine efforts, all they’re doing is hurting children with autism.
After the executive order came out, the sun came up the next day. Parents took their children to the pediatrician’s office. Pediatricians gave them their vaccines according to a schedule, the recommended childhood schedule that is science-based. And the sun came up the next day and the next day after that. I think that this will largely be ignored. I think that state health departments and governors in states are largely going to ignore this. And we can then move past this in much the same way we move past President Trump’s recommendation to drink bleach to try and treat your COVID.
Check out this related video: RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’
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