Studies show no connection with autism
Trump once again placed the new course in the context of the sharp increase in the number of autism diagnoses. The president said he used to take his own children to several separate vaccination appointments. “I think this will have a big impact on autism.”
Health Minister Kennedy also said the government wanted to further investigate possible links between vaccinations, their timing and autism. He explained that an increase in autism diagnoses cannot be explained solely by better detection and must also have environmental causes.
However, after repeatedly evaluating numerous studies, the World Health Organization has come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that vaccinations cause autism. A connection between the MMR vaccination and autism has also not been found in large studies.
The court intervened against the change of course
The order continues the course the Trump administration has been following for months. At the beginning of the year, Kennedy had already tried to scale down the national child vaccination plan, to only issue general recommendations for vaccinations against eleven instead of 17 diseases and to rely more heavily on individual decisions by parents and doctors in all other cases.
However, a federal court temporarily halted these changes in March after medical associations sued. The ruling said that in the past such decisions had been made using “methods of a scientific nature codified by procedural rules in law” but “unfortunately the government has disregarded these methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions.”
The government points to high vaccination rates in Europe
Trump’s new order also does not overturn the court decision. It makes the reduced vaccination plan the government’s declared policy and initiates further steps, but does not automatically change the current vaccination recommendations or the vaccination requirements for schools. In the USA, the latter are generally determined by the states themselves. Trump has now instructed the Justice Department to take legal action against states whose rules the government believes violate the right to religiously or medically based vaccination exemptions.
