by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 10, 2026) — At 2:55 p.m. EDT, President Trump began speaking from the Oval Office regarding the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule, thanking HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for his assistance in contributing to it.
Reading presumably from the order, Trump said the recommended number of vaccine doses for children is now 11 as opposed to the “72 jabs” previously accumulated through age 18.
Trump stressed that the EO maintains that going forward, the MMR vaccine be administered in three separate physicians’ visits rather than one.
“Bad things happen in too many cases,” Trump said, when a large number of shots is given to young children “all in the same day.”
He also said he “wants to find what’s going on with autism” and that the condition has appeared in an increasing number of American children along with the growing number of recommended childhood vaccines over the decades.
Most school systems require that parents adhere to the CDC childhood vaccination recommendations in order for their children to attend school.
At 3:03, Kennedy began speaking about autism studies which have shown an increase in the rate of the disorder in children born in “1989 and after.” “Something happened…that changed our children,” Kennedy said. “You need an environmental toxin, and what the president has charged us with is to find the environmental toxin” causing autism, he said.
He recounted that Trump asked HHS to study the childhood immunization schedule, which he said “could be up to 94 jabs” by age 18 rather than 72.
“We will preserve access to vaccines,” Kennedy said, while also “restoring informed consent.”
His department is researching “vaccine safety,” Kennedy said, and in the process “pursuing dozens of studies and analyses.”
The safety of vaccines given during pregnancy are being studied, he said, as well as “vaccine adjuvants.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched an autism data science initiative, he said, to include “vaccines among the potential” issues to be studied.
All “scientific questions” on autism will be analyzed, Kennedy added.
“We will keep working with urgency,” he said, to instill faith on the part of American parents in U.S. health agencies.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya then spoke, stating that the EO instructs public health agencies to “take seriously” the possibility that vaccines could cause autism. “Science takes time; it’s very frustrating,” he said, “but the teams have been working assiduously for a year…and we’ve changed how the scientific community thinks about autism.”
“Something went wrong. Some bad things were recommended,” Trump said, “and we’ve got to get to the bottom of it.”
At 3:23, Trump signed the executive order and opened the session to reporters’ questions.