The World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s bid to overhaul child vaccination in the United States went against “decades of evidence”.
Trump signed an order on Monday pushing for a rethink of school vaccine mandates and repeating calls for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to be separated into three separate shots.
His Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr founded an anti-vaccine group and has long promoted a disproved link between the MMR shot and autism.
But WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the science was “unequivocal: vaccines – including the MMR vaccine – are safe and do not cause autism”.
“Vaccination policy should be guided by rigorous, independent and transparent review of the best available science, not by political influence,” he warned in a social media post.
He said that the WHO was “concerned that recent changes to US immunisation policy are not aligned with decades of evidence that show when children are most vulnerable to disease”.