Trump says he will push vaccine makers to split some childhood shots into five doses, and offers no evidence it would reduce autism

President Donald Trump said Friday that his administration will recommend dividing certain childhood vaccines into five smaller doses given six months apart, a step Reuters reported he believes would sharply reduce autism. Reuters noted that Trump gave no scientific evidence tying vaccines to autism, a connection scientists have repeatedly debunked.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump said the administration will recommend “five doses marked one, two, three, four, five” given in “six-month intervals, so that a small amount of the vaccine gets pumped into the body,” CNN reported.

Reuters noted that Trump’s August order limiting the childhood schedule to 11 immunizations furthered a goal Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pursued for years. Kennedy has promoted a link between vaccines and autism that scientists have repeatedly debunked. A day before Trump’s announcement, Kennedy told a Children’s Health Defense conference, a group he co-founded and led until 2023, “you have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” and said he intends to “stay in this fight.”

Few details so far

Trump did not say which vaccines would be split, Reuters reported. He also said some vaccines were removed from the schedule because they are not needed until a child is older, according to CNN.

Reuters reported that the August order also called for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to be separated into three individual shots. Experts have pointed out that none of those individual components is currently licensed for use in the United States, which could mean years before such products are available, if they ever are.

Vaccine experts have criticized the idea. CNN spoke with Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who said splitting vaccines into smaller, spaced-out doses would render them ineffective and would not make them safer. He said current dosing schedules come from extensive study meant to optimize both safety and efficacy.

Offit told CNN that vaccine makers run dose-response studies to find the smallest amount that produces a protective immune response, and that giving too little risks a dose that is “sub-immunogenic.”

He also addressed Trump’s earlier claims about the volume of fluid in vaccines, noting that a standard MMR dose is only 0.5 milliliters, or about one-tenth of a teaspoon. Trump has also called the MMR vaccine potentially lethal, a claim CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz later walked back.

On the fear that vaccines overwhelm a child’s immune system, Offit said the human body is built to handle far more. The body makes “a billion new B and T cells every day,” he said, and vaccines are “literally a drop in the ocean” of what it manages daily.

He said the idea that vaccines overwhelm the immune system is not supported by science.