The conservative assault on child health starts with the anti-vaccine campaign and proceeds to cutbacks in nutrition assistance and narrowed access to healthcare. <\/p>\n
In the old days, before accepted medical protocols came under partisan assault, infants typically received a vitamin K shot to enhance blood-clotting capability and a few drops of an antibiotic to stave off eye infections before leaving the hospital, followed by a thorough round of vaccines against life-threatening diseases.<\/p>\n
Americans assumed that \u201cwhatever a family could afford, the country had already decided this child was worth protecting,\u201d Robert B. Shpiner, a critical care expert at UCLA medical school, wrote recently<\/a>. \u201cI have seen children harmed by disease, poverty, by bad luck. I had not, until now, seen them harmed so methodically by their own government.\u201d<\/p>\n Shpiner\u2019s targets were the changes in healthcare policies instituted by the Trump administration generally and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as the mistrust in medical authority that Kennedy and his followers have helped to foment.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to be paying this bill for years to come, because the lack of proper nutrition has profound effects on learning and disability.<\/p>\n \u2014 Robert B. Shpiner, UCLA<\/p>\n As Shpiner wrote in the Guardian, the administration\u2019s assault on child health begins with its anti-vaccination policies. In January, Kennedy\u2019s agency reduced the list of recommended childhood immunizations to 11 from 17, removing shots for COVID-19, hepatitis and meningitis, among other diseases. The agency made the changes without the customary professional consultations, KFF has reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s only the tip of the iceberg. \u201cIt\u2019s just one thing after another,\u201d Shpiner told me. <\/p>\n Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik <\/p>\n Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.<\/p>\n By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n What triggered him into writing his Guardian essay, he says, was learning that congressional Republicans had advanced an agriculture appropriations bill that would cut the fruit and vegetable benefit for children in WIC, the supplemental nutritional program for women, infants and children to $10 a month from $26. <\/p>\n \u201cThat got me to looking at this as a sequence,\u201d he says, starting with the reduction of child immunizations, followed by the proposed cuts in WIC and the cuts in food stamps enacted as part of the Republican budget bill that Trump signed one year ago Saturday (i.e., the Fourth of July, 2025).<\/p>\n \u201cThe image of us taking food away from kids and not giving them enough money to buy some apples and berries\u2014the short-term response is outrage,\u201d he says, \u201cbut the medium- and long-term effect is that we\u2019re going to be paying this bill for years to come, because the lack of proper nutrition has profound effects on learning, and disability and anemia. A number of measures of health and success match with nutrition.\u201d<\/p>\n At almost every stage of childhood development, he notes, programs aimed at preserving or enhancing children\u2019s health have gone on the chopping block. <\/p>\n \u201cA vaccine rule one week, a food program the next,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEach change arrives wrapped in a reasonable rationale: fiscal discipline, local control, parental choice. But arrange them in the order a child actually grows, and the rationales stop mattering.\u201d<\/p>\n Judging from their rhetoric, one would think that Republicans would move heaven and earth to foster child immunizations, nutritional assistance and access to medical care. <\/p>\n In \u201cCommunion,\u201d his recent book about his conversion to Catholicism, for example, Vice President JD Vance writes: \u201cWe want more children in our society because children are profoundly good \u2014 the greatest value add we can create.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the programmatic cutbacks advocated for and implemented by the Republican Congress and Trump give the lie to that sentiment. Let\u2019s examine chapter and verse.<\/p>\n Measles is the canary in the coal mine for vaccination and public health, and at this moment, the canary is singing a doleful tune. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention count 2,134 cases in the U.S. as of June 25. That\u2019s poised to exceed the 2,288 cases in all of 2025, which was the worst outbreak since 1991.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no question why this is happening. It\u2019s because of a decline in measles vaccinations below the 95% generally considered to provide \u201cherd immunity,\u201d in which the disease is so rare that even unvaccinated individuals are protected from exposure. <\/p>\n Kennedy may not deserve all the blame for the immunization decline, but as pseudoscience debunker Steven Novella has pointed out, as secretary he has \u201cdone everything possible to undermine vaccine science <\/a>and confidence in health institutions.\u201d <\/p>\n Kennedy has paid lip service to the value of the MMR vaccine, which combines immunizations for measles, mumps and rubella. But he has claimed without evidence<\/a> that the vaccine causes deaths \u201cevery year\u201d and that the vaccine hasn\u2019t been safety-tested, which isn\u2019t so. He has asserted that it shouldn\u2019t be subject to a government mandate. He also has promoted treatments for measles that aren\u2019t known to be effective. <\/p>\n (The Department of Health and Human Services didn\u2019t respond to my request for comment on the vaccine initiatives.)<\/p>\n As children grow, the crisis of malnutrition kicks in. The House GOP\u2019s cuts to WIC are still only on the drawing board. But the Republican budget bill incorporated cuts to food stamps \u2014 the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP \u2014 that have driven some 4 million people off the program. In 13 states that have published data, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities<\/a>, child enrollment fell by more than 800,000, or 16%, between July 2025 and May of this year. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is where the nutrition cuts become a medical, not merely a moral, story,\u201d Shpiner says. \u201cIron-deficiency anemia in infancy is associated with poorer cognitive, motor, and behavioral outcomes that persist more than 10 years after the deficiency itself has been corrected \u2014 the deficit does not fully reverse even with later treatment. Withdrawing produce and protein from WIC and SNAP at the peak window of brain growth is not a budget line that resets the following year; it is a developmental exposure with a long tail.\u201d<\/p>\n The combination of reduced immunization and poor nutrition build on each other. \u201cUnvaccinated kids are going to get sicker,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf they\u2019re malnourished, they\u2019re going to get sicker. If their parents don\u2019t get affordable care, they\u2019re going to be strapped. It becomes a synergistic and multiplicative cascade.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, the administration\u2019s assault on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act intensifies the damage. Enrollment in Medicaid and the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program, which is part of Medicaid, fell by 4.8 million people, or 6%, from March 2025 through March 2026, according to government data. The enrollment decline for children alone came to more than 1.9 million, or 5%. <\/p>\n White House spokesperson Kush Desai challenged the latter figure when I asked for comment. But it came from KFF, which sourced it to the government\u2019s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cNothing has been done to alter insurance or Medicaid coverage of any vaccination,\u201d Desai told me by email, \u201cand parents are encouraged to seek out the counsel of their pediatrician to make the best decisions for their children.\u201d<\/p>\n The prospects are for further declines. That\u2019s because new work requirements for enrollees in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act are almost certain to drive enrollment down, due to obstacles including paperwork burdens and administrative snafus, resulting in even some eligible enrollees losing their coverage. <\/p>\n