CNN's Daniel Dale debunked what he called "rapid-fire vaccine misinformation" provided by President Donald Trump to justify his executive order changing U.S. vaccine policy.
The 80-year-old made a series of false and misleading claims about vaccines and autism on Monday while signing an executive order recommending that children receive fewer vaccinations spread out over a longer period than called for by current guidelines, Dale reported for CNN.
Trump again suggested a link between vaccines and autism, saying rising autism rates coincided with "progressively more and more vaccines," but that connection has been debunked by more than 40 studies across seven countries involving over 5.6 million people.
"There's no new science," said Dr. Aaron Milstone of Johns Hopkins, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' infectious diseases committee. "Study after study have continued to show no associations between vaccines and autism." The vaccine-autism theory originated from a fraudulent, later-retracted 1990s study; experts attribute the real rise in diagnosed autism cases largely to improved detection and awareness, not vaccines.
Trump also renewed his call to split the combination measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine into three separate shots, claiming that together the vaccines "could be quite lethal." When a reporter pressed him for evidence, Trump admitted he had none, saying only that "some people" say so.
The CDC's own website states there is "no published scientific evidence" that separating the shots offers any benefit, and the combination vaccine has a decades-long safety record. Dr. Paul Offit of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia noted that splitting the doses would likely reduce the odds that children complete the full vaccination series and would mean more injections overall. Separate MMR shots aren't even manufactured in the U.S. currently, according to American Academy of Pediatrics president Dr. Andrew Racine.
Trump repeated his frequent claim that vaccine doses are "the size of a bottle of soda" injected into children. In reality, a typical dose like the MMR vaccine is about 0.5 milliliters — roughly a tenth of a teaspoon — compared with 500-600 milliliters in a standard soda bottle.
He also claimed autism prevalence was "1 in 10,000" 20 years ago, dramatically understating the actual rate. CDC data show the prevalence in 2006 was one in 110, and even in 2000 it was one in 150 — figures far higher than Trump's claim, which appears to reference estimates from studies conducted decades earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Finally, Trump claimed children are required to get "72 jabs," a figure experts say is inflated. Racine said he didn't know where the number originated. It appears to count every individual vaccine dose through age 18 — including optional annual flu and COVID-19 shots that no state actually mandates for school attendance — as a separate "jab," even though some doses are combined into single shots or given orally.
