Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Are Spreading, So Sure, Let's Decrease The Vaccines!
What could possibly go wrong?
So far this year, there have been 2,077 cases of measles in the United States. For comparison, there were 2,288 cases in 2025, which was then the most cases the country had seen in a year since 1991. There have also been over 4,700 cases of whooping cough this year. In April, there was a major rotavirus surge, which can be life-threatening to babies and children. According to a recent report from the New York Times, doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of these illnesses as well as meningitis, pneumonia, and other bacterial infections — and that the cases they’re seeing are increasingly more serious and more likely to require hospitalization.
All of these illnesses can be prevented or at least be made less dangerous by vaccines. But you know that.
On Friday, Donald Trump (not a doctor) signed an executive order he claimed will bring our childhood vaccine schedule in line with the “best practices from peer, developed countries.” It reduces the number of recommended vaccines from 18 to 11. Specifically, the administration has looked to Denmark for guidance; as pointed out at Ars Technica, even Danish vaccine scientists find this utterly ridiculous. In December, Anders Hviid, the head of vaccine safety and effectiveness at Denmark’s equivalent of the CDC, told the New York Times that “it’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark,” which we do not.
Denmark is a teeny-tiny, very homogenous nation that is about the size of Maryland and on an entirely different continent than is the United States. Denmark also has universal health care and provides all recommended vaccines at no cost to families. They also give families up to 52 weeks of parental leave, meaning that babies under the age of one are not as likely to go to daycare, where viral transmission is most likely to occur. In the United States, we do not have that and many parents have to go right back to work the day after giving birth or risk not even being able to feed the child.
The reason they don’t universally recommend certain vaccines in Denmark is because those vaccines are for diseases that are not a problem for them and therefore not worth the cost, not because of any safety issues. You know, like how we don’t inoculate against Yellow Fever unless we are traveling to countries where Yellow Fever is still a problem.
This is not hard.
The executive order reads:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Pursuant to the Presidential Memorandum of December 5, 2025 (Aligning United States Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations with Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries) (Memorandum), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completed a scientific assessment that compared United States childhood immunization recommendations with those of peer nations, analyzed vaccine uptake and public trust, evaluated clinical and epidemiological evidence and knowledge gaps, and examined vaccine mandates (scientific assessment). The scientific assessment found that the United States currently recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation, including more than twice as many vaccine doses as some European nations, and identified a set of consensus vaccines that are consistently recommended in all peer countries. The scientific assessment also found that, instead of implementing vaccination mandates, most peer nations maintain high childhood vaccination rates through public trust and education.
It’s pretty hard to maintain high vaccination rates through “public trust and education” when you have the world’s biggest anti-vaxxer heading up the Department of Health and Human Services and are out here issuing executive orders suggesting that there is some vague, unknown danger in taking the previously recommended number of vaccines and vaccine doses.
This “scientific assessment” was not conducted by vaccine experts, mind you. It was conducted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaxx pals Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports medicine doctor, and Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician who co-authored the notoriously ridiculous Great Barrington Declaration, which recommended that we do more or less nothing to prevent the spread of COVID.
Høeg by the way, was actually fired from the CDC two weeks ago after refusing to resign.
The idea that the US previously recommended some absurd number of vaccines compared to other developed nations is also incorrect. South Korea and Brazil also recommend 18 vaccinations; Greece recommends 17, Canada, Spain and Saudi Arabia recommend 16; the UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, and Australia recommend 15, and so on. Like Denmark, these countries base their vaccine recommendations on what is actually needed in their country, not a belief that more vaccines would somehow be bad or unsafe.
This is basically the vaccine equivalent of saying that cold medicine is dangerous for people who have colds based on the fact that people who do not have colds are not taking cold medicine. Or me, standing around with weirdly bruised shins, insisting that I don’t need to bother taking my iron pills because of all the non-anemic people out there not taking iron pills. People not fixing problems they do not have is not any kind of evidence that the fix for those problems is somehow dangerous or unhealthy.
In response to the executive order, president of the American Medical Association Bobby Mukkamala issued the following statement:
“There is no credible scientific evidence to support changing the current childhood vaccine schedule. That schedule is built on decades of rigorous research and real-world data, and it is designed to protect children in the U.S. when they are most vulnerable based on our nation’s disease burden.
“Altering it without clear, evidence-based justification risks continued confusion for parents and patients, undermining trust in vaccines, and ultimately lowering vaccination rates. That would put more children and communities at risk of preventable illness.
“Vaccines are one of the most effective tools in modern medicine. Decisions about their use must be guided by science, patient safety, and the expertise of unbiased physicians and public health experts—not by policy shifts that erode confidence in proven protections.”
Wouldn’t that be nice?
But we don’t have that. Instead, we have anti-vaxx loons running our public health programs and parents “doing their own research” and taking their cues from people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
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One of the more disturbing details from the New York Times report is that the doctors interviewed said that they don’t see parents changing their minds about vaccines even after their own kids get sick.
Many parents continue to refuse vaccines even after their child has been hospitalized with a vaccine-preventable illness, doctors said. Dr. Kirk said she had never had a parent in that situation tell her they had changed their mind and would have their child vaccinated on the standard schedule. Dr. Hofto said she could sometimes persuade families, but often not.
Some “may view the illness as an isolated experience, especially if their child ultimately recovers,” Dr. Hofto said.
Of course, that’s not entirely surprising, given that, despite the surge in these diseases, we’re not exactly seeing a surge in parents of children who have had these diseases coming out of the woodwork and saying they regret not getting their kids vaccinated.
Another report from NPR mentioned that Michigan officials found that a lot of parents got vaccine waivers for their children not because they are opposed to vaccines, but rather because they just plumb forgot to get them vaccinated. That was part of the reason the state initially started requiring parents who apply for waivers to take a class on the efficacy and safety of vaccines. Unfortunately, the parents were so enraged by this that many counties have moved the classes from in-person to online in order to protect the physical safety of those conducting them.
This is why the mandates are necessary. The idea that these parents are making the “best decisions” for their children based upon the “best available scientific information” and their personal knowledge of their children as individuals (no clue how that would affect anything, but they really like to pretend it does) is patently absurd. We know they are not doing this. We know that educating them does not help and, frequently, tends to make them dig their heels in even more.
This experiment is not going to end well.
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Just moved to California last week after 25+ years as a pediatrician in South Florida. Earlier this year, I saw the first two measles cases of my career at the pediatric urgent care where I practiced. While I am thrilled to live in a state that follows evidence-based medical guidelines for its citizens, I am saddened knowing that children who live in states that don't follow guidelines will suffer because of the stupidity of their parents and their state's health departments.