Pediatricians in Florida are pushing back on President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for changes to the childhood vaccination schedule.
And the state’s leading pediatric medical association, the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said they’re not on board.
“We don’t answer to this nonsense, we don’t recommend changing it,” said Dr. Rana Alissa, president of the FCAAP and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida. “We go by evidence-based science, we don’t go by politics and politicians.”
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.
At his press conference in the Oval Office, Trump promoted previously debunked information that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder.
“Decades 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's a reason for such epidemic rates of autism,” Trump said.
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 “settled,” and the president’s executive order will undo years of hard work.
“We almost eradicated measles, but no, let’s bring it back. Please listen to your pediatrician. Please listen to the people who studied, not the people who have power to talk on TV.”- Dr. Rana Alissa
“This is unprecedented, but that’s not unusual in this administration," she told the News Service of Florida. “It’s unfortunately going to end up being at the cost of a child developing severe measles complications before this madness will end.”
In a statement, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics Dr. Andrew Racine called the executive order “dangerous.”
The order “will do nothing to support families of children with autism or advance understanding of the condition,” Racine said in a released statement. “The 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.”
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.
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.
Herd immunity for measles requires a 95 percent vaccination rate, according to the World Health Organization, yet the average vaccination rate for Florida’s 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.
The closest Florida got to a 95 percent vaccination rate was in 2017, when the average was 94.1 percent.
Alissa said the president’s move will worsen the rates of herd immunity in Florida that pediatricians have been trying to raise for years.
“We almost eradicated measles, but no, let’s bring it back,” she said. “Please listen to your pediatrician. Please listen to the people who studied, not the people who have power to talk on TV.”
