By Ana Go\u00f1i-Lessan, The New Service of Florida<\/p>\n
Pediatricians in Florida are pushing back on President Donald Trump\u2019s executive order calling for changes to the childhood vaccination schedule.<\/p>\n
And the state\u2019s leading pediatric medical association, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said they\u2019re not on board.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t answer to this nonsense, we don\u2019t recommend changing it,\u201d said Dr. Rana Alissa, president of the FCAAP and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida. \u201cWe go by evidence-based science, we don\u2019t go by politics and politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order that advocates for the split of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three separate shots; directs the government to research vaccine safety; and directs all states to provide religious and medical exemptions from vaccine mandates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At his press conference in the Oval Office, Trump promoted previously debunked information that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecades 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. So there\u2019s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Claims that vaccines cause autism are unfounded and have been proven to be false according to numerous studies over decades of research. Dr. Tara Williams, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics in Orlando, said the debate of whether vaccines cause autism has been \u201csettled,\u201d and the president\u2019s executive order will undo years of hard work.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is unprecedented, but that\u2019s not unusual in this administration,\u201d she told the News Service of Florida. \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunately going to end up being at the cost of a child developing severe measles complications before this madness will end.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Dr. Andrew Racine called the executive order \u201cdangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
The order \u201cwill do nothing to support families of children with autism or advance understanding of the condition,\u201d Racine said in a released statement. \u201cThe only purpose of this announcement is to sow confusion so that more people doubt the importance of vaccines. Delaying or skipping shots is risky, especially as measles continues to spread and children go back to school.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo have been outspoken critics of vaccine mandates. This year, DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis and Ladapo pushed hard to expand vaccine exemptions for K-12 schools. All measures to do so, however, failed to make it past the finish line in the Legislature.<\/p>\n
So far in 2026 Florida has reported 155 cases of measles, according to the Florida Department of Health. Most of those cases stemmed from a January outbreak in Collier County at Ave Maria University.<\/p>\n
Herd immunity for measles requires a 95 percent vaccination rate, according to the World Health Organization, yet the average vaccination rate for Florida\u2019s kindergartners this year is 88.9 percent, according to DOH data. Sarasota County has the lowest vaccination rate with 82.1 percent, while Calhoun County has the highest rate with 98.7 percent.<\/p>\n
The closest Florida got to a 95 percent vaccination rate was in 2017, when the average was 94.1 percent.<\/p>\n
Alissa said the president\u2019s move will worsen the rates of herd immunity in Florida that pediatricians have been trying to raise for years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe almost eradicated measles, but no, let\u2019s bring it back,\u201d she said. \u201cPlease listen to your pediatrician. Please listen to the people who studied, not the people who have power to talk on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Ana Go\u00f1i-Lessan, The New Service of Florida Pediatricians in Florida are pushing back on President Donald Trump\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-369395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}