Trump reportedly pushing RFK Jr to cut vaccines more aggressively

White House has halted changing vaccine schedule as it is unpopular, but anti-vaxx Trump set on ‘alleviating autism’

Donald Trump is pushing the longtime vaccine opponent and current health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be more aggressive on cutting vaccines in the US, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has a long record of anti-vaccine statements, but the White House recently put a hold on vaccine changes after polling indicated they were a losing issue in the midterm elections.

Kennedy, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, recently slashed the routine childhood immunization schedule in an unprecedented move.

Trump reportedly asked Kennedy at his northern Virginia golf course in May if the health secretary had the “yips”, according to the Journal.

Trump wasn’t talking about a sudden inability to make putts. Kennedy wasn’t making enough cuts to the US vaccination schedule, Trump reportedly said.

The US president hopes to make “alleviating autism” a component of his legacy, the Journal reported – and he has taken issue with Kennedy’s less aggressive changes to vaccination recommendations in recent months.

“Donald Trump has been anti-vaccine at least since 2015,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. At the Republican primary debate that year, Trump said that autism had gotten “totally out of control” and vaccines should be in “smaller doses over a longer period of time”.

Trump regularly posted on social media about debunked links between vaccination and autism as early as 2014, and his posts on Truth Social have recently advocated for breaking up shots into individual components and delaying some childhood vaccines for more than a decade.

Tony Fabrizio, a top pollster for Trump, found that anti-vaccine moves are unpopular with voters in key districts, concluding in a December memo that “skepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky for both parties”.

Susie Wiles gave HHS the deadline of New Year’s Eve to make vaccine changes, to allow vaccines to fall into the background with the midterms looming, according to reporting by the Rolling Stone.

But Trump’s priorities appear to lie elsewhere. He issued a memo , two days after Fabrizio’s poll results, directing HHS to align with “peer” nations on vaccination recommendations, even though the US was already making similar recommendations to other countries.

A month later, Kennedy slashed vaccine recommendations by one-third, from 17 to 11. A federal judge ordered a halt to these changes following a lawsuit in March from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The judge also paused the work of the advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), which was illegally formed under Kennedy, he said.

Kennedy has not made any significant changes to the vaccine schedule since then, though he has continued speaking about autism and its potential causes, and the US government is appealing the judge’s stay on vaccine changes.

Kennedy also sought to divert $5bn in funding – more than 10% of the entire National Institutes of Health budget – toward research on vaccines and autism, according to reporting by Reuters.

Decades of research into the causes of autism point overwhelmingly to genetics, and dozens of studies have indicated no link between vaccines and autism.

Even so, Trump issued an executive order in May urging HHS to change vaccine recommendations.

Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, did not dispute the details reported by the Journal and others in a statement to the Guardian. He instead pointed to parents of autistic children – but not to autistic people themselves – with “questions and concerns” who “have long been ignored if not mocked”. The Trump administration was “committed to leaving no stone unturned” to address those concerns, Desai added.

Kennedy and Trump are “aligned in their commitment” to confront the “chronic disease epidemic affecting America’s children”, said Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, in an apparent reference to autism. HHS would “continue to pursue evidence-based research to identify the root causes of autism and other chronic diseases”, she added.

“I think Donald Trump has a fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause autism,” Offit said. That makes Trump the most powerful anti-vaxxer in the world, Offit said – and it means he is unlikely to fire Kennedy, even as rumors have swirled that the health secretary is on his way out.

The abrupt rise of measles and other deadly diseases are more likely to be Trump’s legacy than advances in understanding autism, Offit said.

As top leaders have downplayed the safety and importance of vaccines, measles has surged to its highest rate in 30 years, and the nation has suffered a rise in deaths from whooping cough, flu and tetanus in recent years. “And our commander in chief, our vaccine guy in chief, is our president. He’s fine with this. Just as RFK Jr is fine with this,” Offit said.

“Trump has become the president of Measles Land,” Offit added. “That should bother him.”