Britain, France, and Germany Don't Put COVID Shots on the Childhood Schedule. A US Order to Match Them Got Called 'Anti-Science.'

The American childhood vaccine schedule was not handed down whole. In the mid-1980s a child in this country was protected against 7 diseases, and the shots to do it fit on an index card. Today the recommended list covers 18 diseases and dozens of separate injections before kindergarten, each one added on its own evidence and its own timeline, and almost none ever taken back off. For 40 years the schedule moved in a single direction, and it is that history, not the politics of the moment, that makes this week’s fight legible.

On August 10, President Trump signed an executive order directing the government to cut that list. The order would drop the diseases every child is universally advised to be vaccinated against from 18 to 11, pulling hepatitis A, hepatitis B, COVID-19, and influenza off the universal roster. It asks that shots be spread across separate visits “to the maximum extent feasible,” revives the idea of giving measles, mumps, and rubella as 3 separate injections instead of the combined MMR, and tells agencies to develop alternatives to the aluminum adjuvants in several vaccines. The number 11 is not arbitrary, and it is not fringe: it lands close to where several of America’s peer nations already sit. The institutions that spent 5 years insisting the science was settled answered with a reflex, not a rebuttal.

That reflex was uniform. Most major outlets ran the same frame with the same handful of experts. Paul Offit warned the order would “only cause people to become more scared of vaccines.” Stanford’s Yvonne Maldonado said there were “zero data to support these recommendations.” Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin predicted it “will not go into effect and will almost certainly be blocked by the courts.” The New York Times noted it was the president’s third order on the subject in under a year and questioned whether it carried any legal force. The AMA and the American College of Physicians had already condemned the direction of travel. The organizing charge, across nearly all of it, was that the order is anti-science.

On the single biggest item, the peer countries the order points to already do what it proposes. Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation declined to recommend universal COVID-19 vaccination of otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, judging the margin of benefit too small and citing the myocarditis signal that later showed up most sharply in young men. Germany’s STIKO does not recommend COVID vaccination for healthy children and adolescents at all. France’s Académie nationale de médecine urged the shot only for children at risk of severe disease, not the healthy majority. None of them ran the universal pediatric COVID campaign the United States ran, and the CDC itself conceded the point when it stopped recommending COVID shots for healthy children in 2025. The administration’s earlier order named the goal plainly: align the US schedule “with best practices from peer, developed countries.” You can argue with that goal. It is a policy position with real comparators behind it, not a rejection of germ theory.

Give the critics their strongest point, because on one they are right. The order leans on the old vaccine-autism link, and that is the weakest thing in it. The largest study ever run on the question followed more than 1.2 million Danish children born between 1997 and 2018 for up to 8 years, tested aluminum-adsorbed vaccines against 50 chronic conditions including autism, asthma, and dozens of autoimmune diseases, and found no association. It is observational, and it compares gradations of aluminum exposure rather than vaccinated against wholly unvaccinated children, a limitation worth naming. But it is serious work from the Danish registry group whose data have anchored vaccine-safety research for 20 years, and building a policy on the autism theory that same body of evidence undercuts was a strategic mistake.

Not every provision survives that scrutiny, and honesty has to cut both ways. The demand to split MMR into 3 separate shots is the order’s worst engineering. Single-antigen measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines have not been sold in the United States since Merck, the only maker, discontinued them in 2009, and splitting the combined shot would mean more needles, more visits, and a longer window in which a child is unprotected, which quietly contradicts the order’s own goal of fewer visits. That provision would leave children less protected, not more, and it deserves to be named as such.

Notice what the AMA, the ACP, and the experts quoted against the order did not do. They did not separate the defensible provisions from the bad one. An honest referee would have said that dropping universal COVID recommendations for healthy children tracks Britain, Germany, and France, that the MMR split is unworkable, and that the autism premise is wrong. Instead the answer was “zero data” and “anti-science,” phrases that did the sorting so no one had to weigh anything. This is the same public-health apparatus that oversold what the vaccines would do to stop transmission, waved off natural immunity, and was slow to acknowledge the myocarditis signal in young men that Britain’s own advisers had flagged as a reason for caution years earlier. It has not rebuilt the credibility to have its reflexes accepted as findings. When the institutions that got the last 5 years wrong will not engage the parts of a proposal their own peer nations already practice, they forfeit the debate they say they want.

An executive order is not a schedule change. The recommendations that reach a pediatrician’s exam room still run through the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and Gostin may be right that the courts move first. So the number to watch is not the order’s legal odds but whether a single one of its peer-country provisions survives being tied to its worst one. The next real signal comes when ACIP meets to revise the childhood schedule. If the committee can treat “does Britain do this?” as a question worth answering instead of an insult worth swatting, the process is still working. If it cannot, then the 40-year climb was never really about the evidence.

Sources

1. Healio – Trump signs order to reduce recommended childhood vaccines (Aug 10, 2026)
2. NBC News – Trump order aims to cut childhood vaccine list from 18 diseases to 11
3. The New York Times – Trump Signs Executive Order Calling for Fewer Childhood Vaccines
4. CNN – Trump signs executive order aimed at reducing recommended childhood vaccines
5. GOV.UK – JCVI statement on COVID-19 vaccination of children aged 12 to 15 years (Sept 3, 2021)
6. Robert Koch Institute – STIKO vaccination recommendations
7. Académie nationale de médecine – Should children be vaccinated against Covid-19?
8. NPR – CDC to stop recommending COVID vaccine for healthy kids, pregnant women (2025)
9. The White House – Aligning US Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations With Best Practices From Peer, Developed Countries (Dec 2025)
10. Annals of Internal Medicine – Aluminum-Adsorbed Vaccines and Chronic Diseases in Childhood: A Nationwide Cohort Study (2025)
11. Statens Serum Institut – Large Danish study: no link between vaccines and autism or 49 other conditions
12. New England Journal of Medicine – Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Against Covid-19 in Israel
13. Healio – Separate measles, mumps, rubella vaccine formulations discontinued (2012)
14. JAMA – ACP, AMA Decry Executive Order to Change Childhood Vaccine Schedule (2026)