Tangle - Trump’s vaccine executive order.

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

On Monday, August 10, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to make changes to its recommended childhood vaccine schedule. In remarks at the White House signing event, the president also suggested that a link may exist between the number of vaccines children receive and increased rates of autism. Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!The new Suspension of the Rules.This week, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele discuss the debate over what “Woke 1” means and what it says about shifts in the Democratic Party. They also dive into recent primary election results around the country, Senator Darline Graham’s (R-SC) debate response on foreign policy, and Senator Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) recent remarks in Georgia. Check it out here.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Under the radar” story ⁠here⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think about President Trump’s order? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Ari Weitzman and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of R-Tick. If you hear a little bit of queuing and gurgling on the microphone, I've got my eight-week-old with me while my wife said a doctor's appointment. He's just going to be accompanying us during the recording here. He's settling down, so this is probably the last you'll hear from him. But we're covering something pretty topical today.

The Trump administration just released new vaccine schedule recommendations, and I'm not super enthused about them. We've also got a story about some unbelievable polls, literally unbelievable, and I have a nice day's story to wash it all down. We're going to pass it over to Will to get us started, and then I'll be back with my take. Thanks, Ari. All right, let's get into today's quick hits.

Number one, President Donald Trump announced new U.S. sanctions against Iran, calling the measures, quote, economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale. Separately, the United Arab Emirates said it is suspending all trade with Iran in response to renewed Iranian missile attacks. Number two, the Treasury Department said U.S. government debt surpassed $40 trillion, roughly two times the national debt one decade ago. Separately, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said the department will more than double its

government debt buybacks in an effort to support the bond market. Three, President Trump said he will nominate Heidi Overton, a physician and White House Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy, to be the next Food and Drug Administration Commissioner. Four, Moderna and Merck announced that trials of an experimental MRI-based vaccine have showed signs that the vaccine can prevent melanoma from returning or spreading in high-risk patients. And five, a federal judge struck down a rule implemented by the Biden administration that had regulated homemade firearms or ghost guns under the same guidelines as other firearms.

The judge found that the rule conflicted with the United States' historical tradition of personal gunsmithing. Here's a look at how President Trump's executive order overhauls the childhood vaccine schedule. It takes the childhood immunizations and places them into three distinct categories. In one category, the order does recommend these vaccines for all children. The measles mumps and rebella, DTAP, polio, hib, pneumococcal, HPV, and chicken pox. But those are the only ones recommended for all. On Monday, August 10th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to make changes to its recommended childhood vaccine schedule.

In remarks at the White House signing event, the president also suggested that a link may exist between the number of vaccines children receive and increased rates of autism. President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have consistently scrutinized factors. they believe may be impacting autism rates. In September 2025, the two announced a series of food and drug administration actions to address rising autism rates, including updating the warning labels for acetaminophen to note a potential but unproven association between the ingredient and neurological conditions. Separately, Kennedy directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, to remove a claim on its website that vaccine,

do not cause autism and has discounted scientific papers that rejected a link between the two. In 2025, he fired all 17 members of the Independent Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and appointed several new members who have expressed skepticism about vaccines. In the lead-up to last week's executive order in December 2025, President Trump issued a memorandum instructing HHS to conduct a comparative assessment of international vaccine requirements. In May 2026, he issued an order for the CDC to review that HHS assessment and recommend changes to the vaccine schedule as appropriate. This month's order formally establishes the administration's preferred vaccine schedule and directs relevant

federal agencies to implement it. Specifically, it creates three categories of vaccines, with some shots such as measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, and, Tetanus and polio recommended for all children. Others, such as hepatitis A and B, recommended for certain high-risk groups or populations, and others beyond that recommended based on, quote, shared clinical decision-making, such as influenza and COVID-19. It also calls for breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate single-disease shots and revives an HHS task force to develop plans for implementing future changes to childhood vaccination schedules. Those plans include creating new recommendations for vaccine sequencing and identifying alternative

substances to aluminum, a common vaccine ingredient. The order sets a 90-day deadline for the HHS task force to deliver its plan, but no timeline is given for implementing its recommendations. At the signing ceremony, President Trump said, quote, decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today. In those times, people were much healthier, and of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist, end quote. Scientists and doctors have mostly pushed back on both this suggestion and the executive order. Neil Maniare, a public health professor at Northeastern University, said, quote, they're not solving a problem here. They're creating a new one.

Based on false scientific rationale and political ideology, they're changing something that works, into something that we have no idea what it will do. We'll share views on the order from the left, right, and health professionals below, followed by managing editor Ari We'll be right back after this quick break. Here's what the left is saying. The left opposes the order, and many suggest Secretary Kennedy is behind it. Some say the order undermines a key accomplishment from Trump's first term. In Bloomberg, Lisa Jarvis argues,

that changes to vaccine policy have RFK Jr.'s stamp all over it. In an early but damning gauge of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s impact since his assent to U.S. Health Secretary, a growing number of Americans are sending their kids off to kindergarten without crucial vaccines. New data from the Senators for Disease Control and Prevention shows that rates of childhood vaccinations fell across the board for kindergartners during the 2025-26 school year. fewer American children are now protected from entirely preventable, life-altering, and even life-threatening diseases like measles, polio, and tetanus. As we head into another school year, we should worry that the ongoing attacks on vaccines,

now with the full-throated support of President Donald Trump, who last week called for the MMR shot to be broken into three separate vaccines, will mean even more kindergartners walk through the front door vulnerable to highly infectious diseases. Once appointed health secretary, Kennedy immediately turned his focus to codifying his anti-vaccine ethos. This year's kindergartners and all the kids that come behind them deserve so much better. In MS Now, Michael Steele wrote, Trump is undermining his biggest accomplishment. It's a remarkable reversal for a president who once treated vaccine development as one of the signature achievements of his first term. President Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was riddled with misinformation and chaos,

but amid that dysfunction, his administration launched Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that accelerated the development and distribution of COVID vaccines. Six years later, Trump is trashing that legacy as he courts the most conspiracy-minded factions of the coalition that put him back in office. Vaccine skepticism has become a core part of the Maga-Maha. coalition, and Trump would rather validate the fears of that constituency than defend his own record or the science behind it. There's a real risk here. By giving the imprimatur of the White House to these outlandish theories, Trump elevates them in the political conversation and gives them new fuel to metastasize. That is bad enough, but with his latest sop on vaccination to the conspiracy-minded,

Trump is repudiating his own record, hurting his own supporters, and putting the lives of Americans at risk. Now here's what the right is saying. The right is mixed with some praising the new policy. Others questioned Trump's justifications for the executive order. In the American mind, Kevin Roberts wrote about making Americans healthier again. For years, Washington rightly worried about access to affordable care, especially in troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Secretary Kennedy took on a bigger task, making Americans healthier. Vaccines can be part of the arsenal of weapons against disease, but studying the scope, necessity, and safety of these pharmaceutical products, many of which have been added in the last

few decades, is long overdue. That is why President Trump signed an executive order last week that reduce the number of vaccines children receive and space them out, aligning the United States with gold standard science. Critics often accuse Kennedy of undermining trust in vaccines, but as congressional investigators concluded, Biden's own flawed COVID-19 policies did far more to erode public trust and stoke vaccine hesitancy. It will take courage and grit to win public health battles. Fortunately, Kennedy has plenty of both. The Washington Post editorial board argued the president is lying about the MMR vaccine. Trump's order will probably not have immediate repercussions, given that it has already been blocked in court and states that controlled vaccine mandate.

States. Nevertheless, the details are unnerving. Previously, the government recommended universal childhood vaccines for 18 illnesses. Trump's schedule reduces that to 11 and recommends administering them at separate medical visits to the maximum extent feasible, stressing, quote, maximal parental choice. In the Oval Office, Trump claimed that the combined measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine might be, quote, quite lethal, and that if the components were delivered separately, they would be, quote, not at all lethal, end quote. The claim is irresponsible, possibly deadly. The MMR vaccine has been available in its combined form since the early 1970s, and research has

repeatedly affirmed its safety. Yet Trump's assertion might convince parents to forego the vaccine at a time when measles is spreading at its highest levels in more than three decades. This is cherry-picking data to support a preferred outcome, fewer childhood vaccines. Americans may pay the ultimate price. Now here's what health professionals are saying. Most health professionals oppose the order, with some arguing that vaccine policy shouldn't be a partisan matter.

Others say the order undermines decades of medical advancements. In USA Today, Dr. David Margolius wrote, Our kids can't afford for us to politicize vaccines. Health departments across the country work every day to increase vaccination rates. yet we are waging an uphill battle without the clear, unwavering federal leadership on vaccine policy that our nation could once count on. When I trained as a physician, these diseases were largely confined to textbooks rather than clinical practice. Today, they are reemerging, not because the science has changed, but because vaccination rates have declined.

As memories of these diseases have faded and confidence in vaccines has eroded, communities worldwide are facing outside. outbreaks of illnesses that were once under control. For generations, local health departments like mine and the families we serve never had to wonder whether America's top health leaders supported vaccinations. Until recent years, it wasn't a partisan issue, regardless of which party controlled the White House or Congress. When national health leaders speak consistently and clearly, they reinforce the work

of pediatricians, local health departments, and schools. When they don't, every community is left. to fight misinformation and rebuild confidence on its own. It's time for leaders in Washington to do their part by restoring the clear, consistent leadership on vaccines that communities across America need. In the Washington examiner, Dr. Eric Wargots said Trump just reversed a century of medical progress. Public health is not built on executive decrees. It is forged through decades of clinical trial data, independent peer review and trust between physicians and parents. This executive order disrupts our entire medical framework.

By compressing the childhood vaccine schedule from 18 preventable diseases down to 11, demanding the fragmentation of combination shots like the MMR vaccine, and threatening state-level school mandates, this administration is unspooling a century of hard-won victories over infectious disease. The order reclassifies standard life-saving, immunizations into the conditional bucket of, quote, shared clinical decision-making. This means optional. Moving these to shared decision-making will reduce pediatric coverage and leave millions of children vulnerable. As physicians, our primary oath is to do no harm.

While political reality suggests this administration is dug in and highly unlikely to rescind its directive, the medical community must remain equally unyielding. All right, that is it for what the left, right, and health professionals are saying. So now I'm going to pass it back over to Ari for his take. So as I mentioned at the top, my wife and I have a newborn. If you listen closely, you might even be able to hear him sucking on his pacifier while I'm recording. To prepare for this, we've read a syllabus of baby health books, attended a litany of birth classes and doctor appointments, talk to all the new parents in our area and consult the doctors we know and trust on anything

we're unsure of. If I'm honest with myself and with all of you, all that reading, and informing was as much for my own benefit as it was for my sons, to assuage the unfriendly giant of uncertainty and nervousness that began tenetting our house like an ominous shade. Don't get me wrong, my child is happy and healthy, and our home is lovely and bright. I feel truly blessed, but parenthood is a trying time. A sixth consecutive night punctuated with the staccato of inconsolable crying will make scrambled egg of the toughest frontal lobe. And for most of us, it occasionally does. Parents, and especially breastfeeding mothers, lose a lot of sleep in the first three months of a baby's life, which doesn't help with those extant stresses and anxieties.

If that's not bad enough, other findings show that infants can acquire fear from their parents. How's that for a double bind? You obviously want to be concerned for your newborn's well-being. It's almost impossible not to be, but if you're too concerned, you can end up damaging yourself and even your child. This delicate time period, perhaps more than any other, benefits from dispassionate guidance and clear discussion. We're also in a larger climate of skepticism about vaccines at this moment, which I can also empathize with. COVID shook a lot of latent trust in the experts who shape public health policy, and unless you have a PhD in biochemistry, it's hard to gain a full appreciation of the medical procedures were told and sometimes required to subject your

children to. Theoretically, President Trump, with his background of both criticizing and delivering on these vaccines, is in an ideal position here to oversee federal guidelines that take these concerns into account while also delivering clarity. Instead, he's making it harder for parents to know whether they are making safe choices for their families. The latest executive order functionally only does one thing. It reclassifies the vaccines and the CDC's recommended vaccine schedule. And that's kind of it. Since the federal government doesn't mandate vaccines itself, states do this by requiring children to receive certain vaccinations to enroll in public school.

The power of recommendation is really what is at stake here. And in a way, that shift isn't actually too dramatic. The CDC's recommended vaccine schedule before Trump took office classified its shots into three tiers, mandated by all states, mandated by some states, and recommended by the federal government alone. Trump's order introduces new tiers that map kind of surprisingly well onto those existing ones, recommended universally, recommended for high-risk groups, and up to the family and medical team. The largest difference is that several vaccines mandated by some states that would be specifically the Hep A and B vaccines and Menjicoccal vaccine

become recommended for high-risk groups and up to the family for all others. That doesn't sound like too big of a deal, but of course, these aren't analogous tiers going from state mandates to the federal government's guidance. At the end of the day, the CDC recommended all of these shots before, and with the interesting exception of the Dengay vaccine, which it's now recommending, it's now softening many of them. When you consider that it's also directing the Health and Human Services Department to recommend alternatives to the current schedule, you get a giant signal from the government to its citizens saying, slow down and give your children fewer vaccines.

It's not exactly a signal that I think the government ought to be sending here. So why send it? Why do this? Are there actually reasons why people shouldn't take these vaccines or reasons the government may want to alter its recommendations? The justification given within the executive order is that this policy aligns the U.S. with the policies of our pure nations. But that doesn't really carry water, either in practice or in theory.

Let's start practically. The United States was actually already pretty aligned with its pure nations. The 20 countries the health department identified for comparison, all with minor and scant exceptions, recommended the same 11 vaccines. Measles, mumps, rebella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, HIV, pneumocococcal disease, HPV, and rotavirus. Denmark only recommends 10 of those with no rotavirus recommendation, with a median number of vaccines recommended by these countries as 14.

Prior to this order, the U.S. also recommended Hep A, B, meningococcal cancer, disease, rote of virus, influenza, and COVID, bringing the total in the U.S. to 17 vaccines, which is more than any of those countries. Trump wanted to bring us directly in line with their peers. All we would have to do is remove the recommendations for COVID and flu. Instead, the executive order takes us down to 11 universally recommended vaccines, or alternatively, you could argue, brings us up. to 18 vaccines recommended in some way or another,

but with those some way or others adding complexities and complications that make it harder to parse out what the government's recommendations are. Either way you want to interpret it, as a result of this order, we're actually further away from the peer consensus now than we were before. And that's the practicality of it. The philosophical side also falls flat. The administration sees requiring vaccines to attend public school as heavy, be handed. It favors a trust versus a mandate model for the shots. A voluntary model, it says,

is the standard in other countries that we ought to emulate. But in reality, it's not all that standard. 13 European countries mandate at least one vaccine with France, Hungary, and Latvia, mandating nearly the full schedule. Meanwhile, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Malta all effectively mandate vaccination for polio and by extension pertusses. What's more, the federal government is already taking a light-touch approach to vaccines. States decide for themselves which vaccines to mandate. The CDC only issues recommendations. If the order's justifications don't hold up under scrutiny, their oral statements coming from our leaders right now make even less sense.

President Trump said he's seen bottles of vaccines, the size of a soda bottle, quote, poured into a little child's body. I don't know what exactly is on the president's truth's social feed, but that doesn't sound like a baby getting vaccinated. Vaccine doses, of course, are much smaller than soda bottles. They're about a milliliter, so that's a thousand times smaller than a liter of soda. But describing vaccines as frightening and overwhelming is hardly new for Trump. He's expressed fear the size of vaccine doses many times before, going back 10 plus years. And on many occasions, he's alleged that these vaccines,

vaccines cause autism. To me, these statements are bombastic, alarmist, and frankly, embarrassing. But maybe I'm too sensitive to this issue as a new parent to be able to interpret the president's statements with appropriate charitability. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, was up to the task. When asked about what Trump meant, Kennedy attempted to rationalize the statements by saying the president wasn't comparing a single dose to the size of a soda bottle, but the cumulative doses of vaccines, all 57 of them, or 72, or 84 or 94, you know, whatever. When pressed that even 100 shots is still far short of that volume, Kennedy pivoted to saying the real important point is that none of these vaccines have been tested in placebo-controlled

trials. That would be a good point, except for the fact that many have, and the ones that haven't can't ethically be tested that way. For Kennedy, marshalling arguments that sound passable at first and totally collapse under modest scrutiny is nothing new. He's done as before with measles and Tylenol, and now he's doing it again with the children's vaccine schedule. I prefer to be calm over being alarmed, and I would prefer to conclude with a measured tone, and note that this swath of changes is actually moderate,

because it actually is. And I could say that I plan to approach further changes coming out of HHS with an open mind, but I don't think I could survive being that naive, after the removal of the requirement for the hepatitis B shot at birth, and then the attempted changes to the vaccine schedule and firing the sitting members of the ACIP vaccine board and allowing this country to bumble Magoo-like towards losing our measles eradication status, Trump and Kennedy don't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Again, I'll ask, why do this? Why roll back recommendations on vaccines that protect us from some of the worst communicable diseases we've ever seen? and the absence of rational reasons were left with the irrational. They're afraid. And it's not a well-founded, reason-based fear. It's a personal and anecdotal one,

one that's riding a wave of retrospective anger at COVID-era vaccine mandates to dangerous new horizons. There's no scientific reasoning to justify this. There's no missing link found to connect vaccines in autism, no poisonous evad of vaccines spoiling in a hospital sub-basement, no smoking harpoon Kennedy is using to slay his white whale. It's just two of our highest-ranking government officials

in a hermetic bubble of sick of fancy, viling up their cumulative zero years of medical experience to inject into our popular discourse. Can't say I'm a fan. We'll be right back after this quick break. Thanks, Ari. Here is today's Under the Radar story. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported

that one organization's polls for a handful of nationally watched races, including last week's Wisconsin gubernatorial primary and the ongoing Los Angeles mayoral runoff, were fabricated. Median strategies said that its polls were part of a, quote, social experiment to test how effectively unverified political information can spread. Ahead of Wisconsin's August 11th primary, median strategies showed Francesca Hong ahead by over 20 points,

only for her to be defeated by opponent David Crick. Crowley. Then, incumbent Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass promoted a median strategy's poll that demonstrated her supposed 12-point lead over Los Angeles council member Nithia Rahman. On August 17th, median strategies confirmed the inauthenticity of their polling operation and said it had ceased operations. Now here's a note on A Road Not Taken this week. Coming out of last week's break, we kept a close eye on immigration and customs enforcement's plan to buy specialized glitrusts that deliver electric shocks, which officers could use to subdue people being detained. The story generated lots of chatter online, but we were somewhat surprised to find limited opinion

pieces in news outlets, and we opted to go with the stories that generated more robust commentary for this week's main topics. The shock glove story is still on our radar, though, and that's particularly if and when they are used in the field. And last but not least, here's our Have a Nice Day story to bring us home. Would you sort through the trash to find a winning lottery ticket? Well, that's exactly what a team of garbage collectors in the Puglia region of Italy did when one woman, who remains anonymous, realized that she'd accidentally thrown away a one million euro, roughly $1.2 million, lottery-winning ticket.

The lucky lady discarded the ticket after a misunderstanding with her local shop, but was alerted to the mistake by a family member who recognized her numbers. Nicola Tuscano, the administrator of the SANB public waste management company in Bittono, answered the call and worked with his team over the day to sort through the waste and find the winning stub. The team emerged victorious from the search, with Tuscano reporting that the stub was, quote, miraculously still in one piece. All right, that is it for today's edition. We will be back tomorrow with a special Friday edition from Exeastern.

executive editor Isaac Saul on the Department of Government Efficiency. We're really excited to share that one with all of you and are sure it's going to inspire a robust discussion about an issue that we covered a lot last year, but haven't talked about as much this year. Until then, have a great day. And peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign them for a membership, please visit our website at reTangle.com.