President Donald Trump’s executive order on vaccines, signed August 10, is the latest in his administration’s endless attacks on public health. It recommends that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or MMR, be separated into three individual shots. There is no scientific evidence or public health data to support this decision. Trump has even admitted his decision wasn’t based on facts but “on what I feel.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s feelings seem to largely match the conspiratorial anti-vaccination ideas of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which threaten to make the United States more susceptible to once-preventable diseases.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended both to reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and to make it harder for them to get those vaccines.

Trump declared that kids didn’t need to be routinely vaccinated against Hepatitis A and B, or against meningitis—all diseases that can prove life-altering or even lethal. And he targeted the MMR vaccine, which in one shot protects children from mumps, measles, and rubella, and has been spectacularly successful over the decades in reducing childhood mortality rates.

The White House flooded social media on Saturday with an image of Donald Trump showing off the recent Washington Post headline “Prescription drug prices record sharpest drop in more than 60 years”, but failed to mention that experts cited in the article actually attributed the price drop to Joe Biden, not Trump.

On its official accounts, the White House triumphantly captioned the photograph of Trump: “POV: you bring the receipts.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also shared it.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under Trump appointee Mehmet Oz, changed their guidance on voting in nursing homes last month. Now, a group of senators is saying that these changes are designed to disenfranchise America’s two million nursing home residents.

“On July 20, 2026, CMS issued a memo that appears to be an attempt to intimidate nursing home staff from assisting residents in the voting process,” a group of senators led by Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) and Alex Padilla (D-Ca.) wrote August 12, in a letter addressed to Oz and shared exclusively with Mother Jones. The new memo “replaces language from CMS’s 2020 and 2024 guidance aimed at ensuring that facilities helped residents to vote with language threatening nursing home staff with prosecution for voter fraud.” The new guidance removes suggestions of specific ways nursing home staff can help residents vote—providing transportation to polling places, for example—and instead threatens staff with fraud investigations if they “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”