A Trump executive order yesterday will drive down the vaccination rate for schoolchildren in the U.S. The White House provided a fact sheet on its “Gold Standard” for vaccines, which said that its “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations... maximize parental choices over vaccinations.”
A CNN report reviewed the situation. Seven of the eighteen vaccines available over various periods of childhood have been moved to a new “shared clinical decision-making” category—which means that they are no longer to be administered unless the parents get a healthcare provider to prescribe them.
The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Andrew Racine, stated: “The only thing that I can see is going to happen as a result of the announcement from today is an injection of greater amounts of uncertainty and fear and confusion, where there doesn’t need to be any of that.” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted that changes called for in the executive order aren’t being driven by new science or evidence.
