On August 10, Donald Trump got out ahead of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with a direct attack on American healthcare. Standing alongside Kennedy, Trump signed an executive order calling for the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to be “broken up” into three separate shots, declaring, “You should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than getting them all in the same day.”
There is a glaring problem: the single-antigen versions he describes are no longer licensed or manufactured in the U.S., and no drugmaker has agreed to bring them back. Pediatricians quickly warned that the plan would simply result in more missed appointments, higher co-pays, and more unprotected children.
Neither Trump nor RFK Jr. went to medical school. We don’t know if either ever took a biology class.
We do know Kennedy has profited significantly as a vaccine critic: taking home $326,056 in his final year chairing Children’s Health Defense - the anti-vaccine nonprofit he used to sue vaccine makers nearly 30 times since 2020 - alongside $856,559 in Gardasil-litigation referral fees and a standing claim to 10% of any future firm winnings. We also know his own kids are fully vaccinated; he admitted it under oath to the Senate in January 2025.
As for Trump? Perhaps an uncooperative news cycle has him touching base with the MAHA wing of MAGA.
Hepatitis B
Last December, the RFK Jr.-appointed vaccine panel voted to end the 30-year-old rule recommending every newborn receive a hepatitis B shot at birth regardless of maternal status. That rule existed because infants cannot vet the adults around them. A mother’s infection can go undiagnosed, and the virus spreads easily through household contact, not just during delivery.
The stakes are strictly age-specific: an infant infected with hepatitis B has a 90% chance of developing a chronic infection, compared to about 5% for an adult. Roughly a quarter of those chronic childhood cases eventually die of liver disease or cancer. That is the shot they just made optional.
Vaccination: Facts and Compassion
The overwhelming consensus of medical professionals and peer-reviewed studies rejects the claim that vaccines cause more harm than good. A major conflating factor is that conditions like autism are not immediately visible at birth; they often become apparent at the exact age when routine childhood immunizations occur.
That timing is genuinely tragic for parents and grandparents. Watching a child change without a clear explanation brings a unique kind of grief. Reaching for the event that happened right before the change isn’t foolishness - it’s love searching for an answer. Anyone who has lived through that has every right to their feelings.
However, the autism question is now one of the most heavily studied subjects in modern medicine:
The 2019 Danish Cohort Study: Tracked 657,461 children (including those with autistic siblings) and found zero elevated risk following MMR vaccination.
The 2014 Meta-Analysis: Pooled 10 separate studies encompassing 1.2 million children and reached the exact same conclusion.
The entire anti-vaccine panic traces back to a single 1998 study of just 12 children, which was later retracted as elaborate fraud. Its author, Andrew Wakefield, held a patent on a rival single-antigen measles vaccine and had secretly accepted over £435,000 from a lawyer suing vaccine manufacturers before he ever examined a single child. Britain stripped his medical license in 2010.
Nearly 2 million children, studied by researchers with zero financial stake, yielded no link. Twelve children, studied by a man paid to find a link, yielded the exact result he was funded to produce. That is a fact about Wakefield - not about the loving parents who believed a study engineered to deceive them.
None of that diminishes anyone’s personal grief. But what remains indefensible are public figures who vaccinated their own children while telling the public it is unsafe - and the men continuing to profit off that confusion.
The Reality of Measles
Some older Americans remember having measles before the vaccine existed and surviving it. So why the urgent push for childhood vaccination now?
Because many didn’t survive.
Before 1963, measles infected an estimated 3 to 4 million Americans annually. Among the roughly 500,000 cases formally diagnosed each year, about 500 people died - most of them children. Millions of others survived but paid a heavy permanent price:
Pneumonia: Strikes roughly 1 in 20 diagnosed children.
Encephalitis: Causes severe brain swelling leading to permanent deafness or intellectual disability in 1 in 1,000 children.
SSPE: A rare, fatal brain degeneration that surfaces 7 to 10 years after an initial infection acquired in infancy.
Measles is also the most transmissible virus known to science, capable of infecting 12 to 18 people in an empty room hours after an infected individual has left.
Worse, it causes “immune amnesia.” Research from Harvard and the Broad Institute revealed that a measles infection hunts down and destroys immune memory cells, wiping out 11% to 73% of a child’s existing antibody protection against other diseases they had already fought off - a hidden toll researchers linked to nearly half of all childhood infectious-disease deaths in the pre-vaccine era.
We are seeing the consequences of falling coverage right now. As of August 25, the U.S. has confirmed 2,777 measles cases in 2026, officially surpassing 2025 as the worst year for the virus since 1991. 93% of patients were unvaccinated or of unknown status. A federal committee convened this month to evaluate whether the U.S. will lose its official “measles elimination status” - a benchmark held for 26 years. The committee chair described the trajectory bluntly: “a runaway train.”
Distrust and the Human Toll
It is easy to see why populist messaging takes root. Early pandemic errors, evolving mask guidance, and overly cautious public health calls created room for figures like RFK Jr. and Trump to paint institutional uncertainty as malice. It benefits a populist strategy to claim the establishment is lying and only one leader holds the truth.
But political skepticism doesn’t stop real-world harm. Measles has hospitalized 7% of confirmed U.S. cases this year. On August 25, Pennsylvania reported its first measles deaths in three decades - two individuals in Lancaster County, the epicenter of an outbreak exceeding 390 cases.
Abroad, the Trump Administration policy shifts carry an even heavier toll. When federal foreign assistance cuts gutted USAID programs, funding for HIV therapies, malaria nets, and routine childhood immunizations evaporated across dozens of developing nations. Researchers at Boston University tracking the data estimate over 700,000 excess deaths - including more than 500,000 children - in the first year alone.
NPR reported in detail about three of them:
· Abdullahi Ibrahim was a 10-year-old boy in Nigeria whose asthma was entirely manageable until his local USAID-funded clinic lost access to free medication. He died during an asthma attack.
· Purity Wamboi, 16, died of tuberculosis in Kenya after the USAID-funded community health workers who might have caught it early lost their jobs.
· Ibrahim Garba, 8, died of typhoid in Nigeria when his family couldn’t afford the antibiotics a shuttered clinic used to hand out free.
When a quisling such as Marco Rubio claims, “No children are dying on my watch,” or Elon Musk dares critics to name a single person who died, these are some names to answer them.
The Adult Version
There is a phrase for children pretending to practice medicine on one another: playing doctor. It’s harmless when kids do it because nobody is actually sick and nobody is truly in charge.
What we are witnessing now is the adult version: individuals without medical training, holding deep political and financial incentives, wielding real authority over public health policy for 340 million Americans and millions more worldwide.
When untrained figures dictate national healthcare choices, it isn’t a game. It is official policy, and it carries a body count.
Sources
• Trump signs executive order to break up the MMR vaccine (CIDRAP)
• RFK Jr.’s Gardasil referral fees and Children’s Health Defense income (NPR)
• RFK Jr. told the Senate all his children are vaccinated (NPR)
• Hviid et al., 657,461-child Danish MMR-autism cohort study, 2019 (PubMed)
• Taylor et al., meta-analysis of 1.2M+ children, 2014 (PubMed)
• The fraudulent Wakefield MMR-autism study (Wikipedia, sourced to the BMJ/Brian Deer investigation)
• Measles signs, symptoms and complication rates (CDC)
• Pre-vaccine era measles case and death figures, Pink Book (CDC)
• SSPE latency period (NCBI StatPearls)
• Measles named the most contagious disease on record (Guinness World Records)
• How measles causes immune amnesia (ASM.org)
• Measles wipes out up to 73% of antibody protection, 2019 study (HHMI)
• Mina et al., measles immunomodulation and childhood mortality, 2015 (PMC)
• 2026 U.S. measles case count and elimination-status review (Medical Daily)
• 2025 U.S. measles deaths in Texas and New Mexico (NBC DFW)
• Pennsylvania’s first measles deaths of 2026 (Axios)
• USAID cuts, 700,000+ deaths, named victims, Rubio and Musk quotes (NPR)
Such thorough research with a comprehensive explanation of the dismantling of our country's childhood immunization program. A program that was envied across the globe. Thank you
When these cabinet candidates are being brought before Congress to have their appointments approved, they lie under oath. The conservative justice’s did as well. Why are we not suing/impeaching them and removing them from their posts? We already have measles deaths again because of RFK’s false information about vaccines, and I am sure there are more to come unfortunately. He should be charged with manslaughter.