President Donald Trump is breaking with critics of vaccine mandates – casting new uncertainty over the future of US public health policy.
On Friday, the president undermined Florida‘s new push to abolish all state immunization requirements for children attending public and private schools, including shots for measles, polio and whooping cough.
‘Those vaccines should be used, otherwise some people are going to catch it and they endanger other people,’ Trump said in the Oval Office.
His remarks also followed a Thursday Senate hearing during which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy faced off against a bipartisan pack of senators, who questioned his rollback of federal Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy kids and adults.
‘How many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice for enacting an agenda that I think is fundamentally cruel and defies common sense,’ harangued Democratic Senator Ron Wyden.
‘Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long? 20, 25 years, while the chronic disease of our children went up to 76 percent. And you said nothing,’ Kennedy shouted back, irate and twitching.
‘Today, for the first time in 20 years, we learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened during the Biden administration that we’re going to end.’
The Daily Mail has now spoken to physicians and policy experts on both sides of this raging debate to determine what the future of public health in America may look like.
Kennedy (pictured) faced off against a bipartisan pack of senators, who questioned his rollback of federal Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy kids and adults
On Friday, the president undermined Florida ‘s new push to abolish all state immunization requirements for children attending public and private schools, including shots for measles, polio and whooping cough
Federal Covid vaccine mandates swung into force during the pandemic, barring people from workplaces, schools and public buildings if they hadn’t received one vaccine, then two, then three. Now, many of America’s public health decisions are going the other way.
In May, Kennedy dumped the CDC recommendation that all children should receive the Covid vaccine. Then in June, he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Biden-era advisory panel on vaccines, saying a ‘clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.’
Kennedy’s opponents say he is achieving the opposite effect by packing the panel with controversial vaccine skeptics. But his supporters believe that relaxing mandates will help repair damage by heavy-handed Covid-era rules, even if its results in a momentary drop in vaccination rates.
Dr Aseem Malhotra, a medical advisor to MAHA Action, a non-profit that backs Kennedy’s agenda said: ‘It is likely that we would see a lull in vaccine uptake if mandates were removed.’ But, he said, ‘vaccine uptake would then bounce back as confidence in public health measures is restored.’
Dr Harvey Risch, an epidemiologist at Yale, told the Daily Mail that ‘the only way that [the American public] can get past this [trust deficit] is to restore faith in the vaccine information and in these government agencies.’
He added: ‘My anxiety is low that any large or substantial outbreaks will occur during this transition period as we get back to a routine and more open environment about the vaccines.’
Risch pointed to the fact that America saw millions of illegal immigrants enter the country across its southern border in 2024 alone, many unvaccinated, yet recorded few outbreaks.
‘For the usual childhood diseases here, there is a lot of herd immunity among adults from past childhood vaccinations,’ he claimed.
Mandate advocates, of course, see it differently.
Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy expert and vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Daily Mail: ‘Without mandates and with more unvaccinated children, more outbreaks and harms will happen.
‘This is especially true of measles where over 95 percent vaccination rates are needed for community protection. This level of skepticism about safety will lead to more measles outbreaks… and deaths.’
Currently, every US state requires preschoolers to be vaccinated against about 14 diseases (Florida’s vax rollback doesn’t snap into effect until December 3). Those who are not vaccinated can be refused a state education, unless granted reprieve from state rules.
All 50 states also offer exemptions from the mandate rules based on some combination of religious, medical or philosophical grounds.
Federal Covid vaccine mandates swung into force during the pandemic, barring people from workplaces, schools and public buildings if they hadn’t received one vaccine, then two, then three. (Pictured: A child reviews a Covid vaccine in 2022)
The deep blue states of California, New York, Connecticut and Maine – and Republican-led Mississippi and West Virginia – allow medical exemptions if a licensed provider certifies that vaccination may pose a risk to the health of an individual.
More than two dozen states permit medical and religious exemptions. And 13 states, including Colorado and Texas, also allow philosophical objections. These are the states most likely to be willing to further loosen or axe mandates entirely.
Republican-led Idaho is an outlier. It passed a ‘medical freedom’ law this year that ostensibly forbids schools from refusing entry to children who are not vaccinated — but there has been confusion over the law implementation. For now, Idaho’s Health Department still lists childhood vaccination as required.
Nationally, a relatively minor 3.6 percent of kindergarteners were exempted from vaccination mandates during the 2024 to 2025 school year, according to the latest public data, though that is the highest percentage since 2011.
The latest data for five-year-olds during the 2023 to 2024 school year shows that 92.7 percent of children had received two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and 92.6 percent had received four doses of the polio vaccine, which are below the CDC’s recommended 95 percent coverage rate to guarantee herd immunity.
Kennedy’s defenders and those sympathetic to Florida’s reforms says European countries that don’t have vaccine mandates and report similar vaccination rates.
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the National Institutes of Health, America’s primary health research agency, told Newsmax last week: ‘If you look in the UK, if you look in Sweden, if you look in Denmark, none of them have vaccine mandates for any of their vaccines, all of the vaccines are voluntary in those places.’
Indeed, in Denmark, where health authorities do not mandate vaccines, 93 percent of children had received two MMR doses in 2024 and 90 to 95 percent were up to date on their polio vaccinations.
In Sweden, 93.7 percent of children had got two doses of MMR in 2024 and 94.5 percent had received three doses of the polio vaccine.
The UK does not have as high an uptake as these countries. Among children aged five years old in the 2023 to 2024 school year, 84.4 percent of children had received two doses of the MMR vaccine while 82.4 percent were vaccinated against polio.
Neither country had reached the World Health Organization or CDC’s recommendation that 95 percent of children be inoculated in order to prevent an outbreak of disease.
At the same time, neither has recorded pervasive disease outbreaks.
Dr Jay Bhattacharya (pictured) said: ‘If you look in the UK, if you look in Sweden, if you look in Denmark, none of them have vaccine mandates for any of their vaccines, all of the vaccines are voluntary in those places’
Dr Emanuel told the Daily Mail: ‘Without mandates and with more unvaccinated children, more outbreaks and harms will happen.’ (Pictured: A measles, mumps and rubella vaccine being prepared)
Bhattacharya sees these foreign vaccination rates as proof that the European public trusts government regulations – a faith that he believes was compromised in the US by health authorities during the Covid pandemic.
‘What [the UK, Sweden and Denmark] do have is public health that doesn’t lie to their people, and so [they] have amazing vaccine uptake for vaccines like the MMR in all those places,’ he told Newsmax.
He added: ‘They are not forcing people, what they are doing is they are reasoning with people. I find that approach quite attractive.’
Dr Thomas Moore, an infectious diseases expert in Kansas, disagreed with the comparison, however, saying that the UK has more a homogenous population than the US, suggesting that makes it easier for the British health authorities to encourage collective action instead of mandating it.
He is also concerned that relaxing vaccination mandates would exacerbate opt-outs, harming the most vulnerable.
‘In general parents worry about their children and try to do what is best for them,’ he said, ‘but the problem is those parents can also be deceived by misinformation and internet rumor online and, sadly, that will impact their children’.
Furthermore, Dr Moore warned that the varying approaches risked ‘splintering’ vaccine policy along ideological lines.
‘What’s happening is there’s no more federal leadership from the CDC,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘So there are now effectively 50 CDCs.’
America did record a major measles outbreak in West Texas from January up to August this year, with a total of 762 confirmed cases and two fatalities, both in school-aged girls.
That outbreak was largely isolated to a Mennonite community, which also recorded a polio outbreak.
Dr Malhotra of MAHA Action dismiss the idea of that example as an omen for national public health.
‘I do think that the measles outbreak in Texas among a religious community may have been a one-off, that was a group with already low vaccination rates.’
Now as this latest public policy test plays out – America awaits the verdict.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .