Trump’s new vaccine policy could have global ramifications | STAT
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OpinionFirst Opinion
I’ve seen what life is like without vaccines. Americans need to understand what they save us from
The ability to prevent a deadly infectious disease is an extraordinary privilege
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By Krutika Kuppalli<br>Aug. 13, 2026
Kuppalli, M.D., is an infectious diseases physician and former World Health Organization medical officer.
I have spent much of my career responding to infectious diseases in places where vaccines were desperately needed but not always available.
In Haiti, I watched a patient die of tetanus, their body seized by violent, agonizing spasms until they could no longer breathe. Watching someone die that way from a disease a simple vaccine can prevent is something I have never forgotten.<br>Advertisement
In 2014, I worked in an Ebola treatment unit established within a local hospital in Sierra Leone. I watched mothers travel for hours through communities devastated by the epidemic to bring their children to the hospital for whatever vaccines were available. They understood something Americans increasingly seem to be forgetting: The ability to prevent a deadly infectious disease is an extraordinary privilege.
I have also seen what happens when science gives us that ability.
The development of an effective vaccine against Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) transformed our ability to respond to Ebola. During the 2018-2020 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 300,000 people were vaccinated, helping protect those at risk and slow transmission. Since then, the vaccine has been deployed successfully in multiple outbreaks, helping break chains of transmission and prevent countless infections and deaths.<br>Advertisement
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Today, we are being reminded of the value of that achievement by its absence.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is now confronting the largest Ebola outbreak in its history, caused by Bundibugyo virus (BDBV). Unlike EBOV, there is no licensed vaccine against it. Scientists are racing to change that, with the first Phase 1 trial of a BDBV-specific vaccine beginning in July. During an outbreak, every day matters. Every infection prevented can mean another person who does not become sick and another family that does not lose someone they love.
That is what makes what is happening simultaneously in the United States so difficult to comprehend.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order establishing what his administration calls the “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations.” The order divides childhood vaccines into different categories, pushes states to reconsider school vaccination requirements, and calls for childhood vaccines to be administered at separate appointments “to the maximum extent feasible.” It specifically calls for eventually replacing the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine with three separate vaccines.
There is no evidence-based public health rationale for making routine vaccination more cumbersome.
Combination vaccines allow children to receive protection efficiently and on schedule. Requiring additional visits creates more opportunities for missed appointments and delayed vaccination, especially for families who cannot repeatedly take time off work or arrange transportation and childcare.
Delaying vaccination does not make children safer. It leaves them vulnerable for longer.
More troubling is the rationale surrounding these changes. On Monday, Trump again invoked autism while announcing the policy. Yet decades of research involving millions of children have found no causal relationship between vaccines and autism.
We should not reopen scientific questions because political leaders dislike the answers. And we certainly should not redesign childhood vaccine policy around...