# content
Happy Thursday everyone. This is Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, enjoying what is truly a wonderful Thursday for people with my exact music tastes. Noah Kahan dropped his second full-length album earlier this summer, Phoebe Bridgers just released her third last week, and the inimitable Killers frontman Brandon Flowers is out with Thrasher, his third solo effort, tomorrow. I believe Flowers is my generation’s Bruce Springsteen, and I will not die on that hill but instead live immortally upon it. My expectations are already through the roof, and I cannot wait for tomorrow’s release.

But wait, alas, we must. So let’s get through these remaining twelve hours by talking about politics! Just this past week, the Trump administration released new vaccine recommendations, and I’m less enthused but just as eager to talk about them. Then, an unbelievable story about unbelievable polls, and at the end of it you’re 13 minutes closer to Thrasher.

The new Suspension of the Rules.

This week, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele discuss the debate over what “Woke 1” means and what it says about shifts in the Democratic Party. They also dive into recent primary election results around the country, Senator Darline Graham’s (R-SC) debate response on foreign policy, and Senator Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) recent remarks in Georgia. Check it out here:

Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump announced new U.S. sanctions against Iran, calling the measures “Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.” (The comments) Separately, the United Arab Emirates said it is suspending all trade with Iran in response to renewed Iranian missile attacks. (The suspension)

2. The Treasury Department said U.S. government debt surpassed $40 trillion, roughly two times the national debt one decade ago. (The announcement) Separately, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the department will more than double its government debt buybacks in an effort to support the bond market. (The move)

3. President Trump said he will nominate Heidi Overton, a physician and White House deputy assistant for domestic policy, to be the next Food and Drug Administration commissioner. (The nomination)

4. Moderna and Merck announced that trials of an experimental mRNA-based vaccine have shown signs that the vaccine can prevent melanoma from returning or spreading in high-risk patients. (The results)

5. A federal judge struck down a rule implemented by the Biden administration that regulated homemade firearms, or “ghost guns,” under the same guidelines as other firearms. The judge found that the rule conflicted with the United States’s “historical tradition” of personal gunsmithing. (The decision)

SPONSORED by the penny hoarder

The biggest savings aren’t in your coffee budget

Cutting small daily spending only goes so far. The bigger money is usually sitting in the bills you already pay every month and never think to question: car insurance, credit card interest, everyday online purchases.

The Penny Hoarder put together four ways to bring those down without changing how you live. Drivers who shop their insurance rate save up to $1,025 a year on that line alone.

See the four

Today’s topic.

Trump’s vaccine executive order. On Monday, August 10, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to make changes to its recommended childhood vaccine schedule. In remarks at the White House signing event, the president also suggested that a link may exist between the number of vaccines children receive and increased rates of autism.

Back up: President Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have consistently scrutinized factors they believe may be impacting autism rates. In September 2025, the two announced a series of Food and Drug Administration actions to address rising autism rates, including updating the warning labels for acetaminophen to note a potential (but unproven) association between the ingredient and neurological conditions. In broader moves, he fired all 17 members of the independent Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and appointed several new members who have expressed skepticism about vaccines.

In the lead-up to last week’s executive order, in December 2025, President Trump issued a memorandum instructing HHS to conduct a comparative assessment of international vaccine requirements; in May 2026, he issued an order for the CDC to review that HHS assessment and recommend changes to the vaccine schedule as appropriate. This month’s order formally establishes the administration’s preferred vaccine schedule and directs relevant federal agencies to implement it.

Specifically, it creates three categories of vaccines, with some shots (such as measles, mumps, rubella [MMR]; diphtheria; tetanus; and polio) recommended for all children, others (such as hepatitis A and B) recommended for “certain high-risk groups or populations,” and others recommended based on “shared clinical decision-making” (such as influenza and Covid-19). It also calls for breaking up the MMR vaccine into three separate, single-disease shots and revives an HHS task force to develop plans for implementing future changes to childhood vaccination schedules. Those plans include creating new recommendations for vaccine sequencing and identifying alternative substances to aluminum, a common vaccine ingredient. The order sets a 90-day deadline for the HHS task force to deliver its plan, but no timeline is given for implementing its recommendations.

At the signing ceremony, President Trump said, “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.” Scientists and doctors have mostly pushed back on this suggestion and the executive order. Neil Maniar, a public health professor at Northeastern University, said, “They’re not solving a problem here. They’re creating a new one… Based on false scientific rationale and political ideology, they’re changing something that works into something that we have no idea what it will do.”

We’ll share views on the order from the left, right and health professionals below, followed by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman’s take.

What the left is saying.

The left opposes the order, and many suggest Kennedy is behind it.

Some say the order undermines a key accomplishment from Trump’s first term.

In Bloomberg, Lisa Jarvis argued that changes to vaccine policy “[have] RFK Jr.’s stamp all over it.”

“In an early but damning gauge of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s impact since his ascent to US health secretary, a growing number of Americans are sending their kids off to kindergarten without crucial vaccines,” Jarvis wrote. “New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that rates of childhood vaccinations fell across the board for kindergarteners during the 2025-2026 school year… Fewer American children are now protected from entirely preventable, life-altering and even life-threatening diseases like measles, polio and tetanus.

“As we head into another school year, we should worry that the ongoing attacks on vaccines — now with the full-throated support of President Donald Trump, who last week called for the MMR shot to be broken into three separate vaccines — will mean even more kindergarteners walk through the front door vulnerable to highly-infectious diseases,” Jarvis said. “Once appointed health secretary, Kennedy immediately turned his focus to codifying his anti-vaccine ethos… This year’s kindergartners, and all the kids that come behind them, deserve so much better.”

In MS NOW, Michael Steele wrote “Trump is undermining his biggest accomplishment.”

“It’s a remarkable reversal for a president who once treated vaccine development as one of the signature achievements of his first term,” Steele said. “President Donald Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was riddled with misinformation and chaos. But amid that dysfunction, his administration launched Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that accelerated the development and distribution of Covid vaccines… Six years later, Trump is trashing that legacy as he courts the most conspiracy-minded factions of the coalition that put him back in office.”

“Vaccine skepticism has become a core part of the MAGA-MAHA coalition, and Trump would rather validate the fears of that constituency than defend his own record or the science behind it,” Steele wrote. “There’s a real risk here. By giving the imprimatur of the White House to these outlandish theories, Trump elevates them in the political conversation and gives them new fuel to metastasize… That is bad enough. But with his latest sop on vaccination to the conspiracy-minded, Trump is repudiating his own record, hurting his own supporters and putting the lives of Americans at risk.”

What the right is saying.

The right is mixed, with some praising the new policy.

Others question Trump’s justifications for the executive order.

In The American Mind, Kevin Roberts wrote about “making Americans healthier again.”

“For years, Washington rightly worried about access to affordable care, especially in troubled federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. [Secretary] Kennedy took on a bigger task: making Americans healthier,” Roberts said. “Vaccines can be part of the arsenal of weapons against disease. But studying the scope, necessity, and safety of these pharmaceutical products — many of which have been added in the last few decades — is long overdue.

“This is why President Trump signed an executive order last week that reduced the number of vaccines children receive and spaced them out, aligning the United States with gold standard science. Critics often accuse Kennedy of undermining trust in vaccines. But as congressional investigators concluded, Biden’s own flawed COVID-19 policies did far more to erode public trust and stoke ‘vaccine hesitancy,’” Roberts wrote. “It will take courage and grit to win [public health battles]. Fortunately, Kennedy has plenty of both.”

The Washington Post editorial board argued “the President is lying about the MMR vaccine.”

“Trump’s order will probably not have immediate repercussions, given that it has already been blocked in court and that states control vaccine mandates. Nevertheless, the details are unnerving,” the board wrote. “Previously, the government recommended universal childhood vaccines for 18 illnesses. Trump’s schedule reduces that to 11 and recommends administering them at separate medical visits ‘to the maximum extent feasible,’ stressing ‘maximal parental choice.’”

“In the Oval Office, Trump claimed that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine might be ‘quite lethal,’ and that if the components were delivered separately, they would be ‘not at all lethal.’ The claim is irresponsible, possibly deadly. The MMR vaccine has been available in its combined form since the early 1970s, and research has repeatedly affirmed its safety,” the board said. “Yet Trump’s assertion might convince parents to forgo the vaccine at a time when measles is spreading at its highest levels in more than three decades… This is cherry-picking data to support a preferred outcome: fewer childhood vaccines. Americans may pay the ultimate price.”

What health professionals are saying.

Most health professionals oppose the order, with some arguing that vaccine policy shouldn’t be a partisan matter.

Others say the order undermines decades of medical advancements.

In USA Today, Dr. David Margolius wrote “our kids can’t afford for us to politicize vaccines.”

“Health departments across the country work every day to increase vaccination rates. Yet we are waging an uphill battle without the clear, unwavering federal leadership on vaccine policy that our nation could once count on,” Margolius said. “When I trained as a physician, these diseases were largely confined to textbooks, rather than clinical practice. Today, they are reemerging — not because the science has changed, but because vaccination rates have declined. As memories of these diseases have faded and confidence in vaccines has eroded, communities worldwide are facing outbreaks of illnesses that were once under control.”

“For generations, local health departments like mine and the families we serve never had to wonder whether America’s top health leaders supported vaccinations. Until recent years, it wasn’t a partisan issue, regardless of which party controlled the White House or Congress,” Margolius wrote. “When national health leaders speak consistently and clearly, they reinforce the work of pediatricians, local health departments and schools. When they don’t, every community is left to fight misinformation and rebuild confidence on its own… It’s time for leaders in Washington to do their part by restoring the clear, consistent leadership on vaccines that communities across America need.”

In the Washington Examiner, Dr. Eric Wargotz said “Trump just reversed a century of medical progress.”

“Public health is not built on executive decrees. It is forged through decades of clinical trial data, independent peer review, and trust between physicians and parents,” Wargotz wrote. “This [executive order] disrupts our entire medical framework. By compressing the childhood vaccine schedule from 18 preventable diseases down to 11, demanding the fragmentation of combination shots like the MMR vaccine, and threatening state-level school mandates, this administration is unspooling a century of hard-won victories over infectious disease.”

“The order reclassifies standard, lifesaving immunizations against hepatitis B, influenza, rotavirus, and meningococcal disease into the conditional bucket of ‘shared clinical decision-making.’ This means optional… Moving these to shared decision-making will reduce pediatric coverage and leave millions of children vulnerable,” Wargotz said. “As physicians, our primary oath is to do no harm… While political reality suggests this administration is dug in and highly unlikely to rescind its directive, the medical community must remain equally unyielding.”

My take.

Ari Weitzman

Managing Editor

The order’s recommended changes signal to parents that they should give their children fewer vaccines.

The administration’s justification for this move is lacking — both in the order’s text and leaders’ public statements.

Trump and Kennedy aren’t making decisions based on science, but personal hunches.

Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment on the website or reply to this email.

My wife and I have a newborn at home. We’ve read a syllabus of baby health books, attended a litany of birth classes and doctor appointments, talked to the new parents in our area, and consulted doctors we know and trust on anything we’re unsure of. If I’m honest with myself (and with you), all that reading and informing was as much for my own benefit as it was for my child’s — to assuage the unfriendly giant of uncertainty and nervousness that began tenanting our house like an ominous shade.

Don’t get me wrong, my child is happy and healthy, and our home is lovely and bright. I feel truly blessed. But parenthood is a trying time. A sixth consecutive night punctuated with the staccato of inconsolable crying will make scrambled egg of the toughest frontal lobe, and for most of us it occasionally does. Parents, and especially breastfeeding mothers, lose a lot of sleep in the first three months of a baby’s life, which doesn’t help with those extant stresses and anxieties. And if that’s not bad enough, other findings show that infants can acquire fear from their parents.

How’s that for a double bind? You obviously want to be concerned for your newborn’s wellbeing — it’s almost impossible not to be — but if you’re too concerned, you can end up damaging yourself and even your own child.

This delicate time period, perhaps more than any other, benefits from dispassionate guidance and clear discussion. We’re also in a larger climate of skepticism about vaccines at this moment, which I can empathize with. Covid shook a lot of latent trust in the experts who shape public health policy, and unless you have a PhD in biochemistry, it’s hard to gain a full appreciation of the medical procedures we’re told — and sometimes required — to subject our children to. Theoretically, President Trump, with his background of both criticizing and delivering these vaccines, is in an ideal position to oversee federal guidelines that take these concerns into account and deliver clarity. Instead, he is making it harder for parents to know whether they are making safe choices for their families.

Executive Order 14420 functionally only does one thing: reclassifies the vaccines in the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule. Since the federal government doesn’t mandate vaccines itself (states do this by requiring children to receive certain vaccinations to enroll in public school), the power of recommendation is really what is at stake here. And in a way, that shift isn’t actually too dramatic. The CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule before Trump took office classified its shots into three tiers — mandated by all states, mandated by some states, and recommended by the federal government. Trump’s order introduces new tiers that map decently well onto those existing ones — recommended universally, recommended for high-risk groups, and up to the family and medical team. The biggest difference is that several vaccines mandated by some states — Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Meningococcal ACWY — become recommended for high-risk groups and up to the family for all others.

Comparison of new federal vaccine recommendations and state-level mandates | Image by Aidan Gorman

That doesn’t read like too big of a deal. But, of course, these aren’t analogous tiers. You can’t treat the way states mandate vaccines as equivalent to the federal government’s guidance. At the end of the day, the CDC recommended all of these shots before and (with the interesting exception of the dengue vaccine) is now softening many of them. When you consider that it’s also directing HHS to recommend alternatives to the current schedule, you get a giant signal from the government to its citizens saying to slow down and give children fewer vaccines.

Why do this? Are there reasons why people shouldn’t take these vaccines, or reasons the government may want to alter its recommendations? The justification given within the executive order is that this policy aligns the U.S. with the policies of our peer nations. But that doesn’t carry water, either in practice or in theory.

Practically speaking, the United States was already pretty aligned with its peer nations. The 20 countries the Health Department identified for comparison all, with scant exceptions, recommend the same 11 vaccines — measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, Hib, pneumococcal disease, HPV, and rotavirus. Denmark recommends only 10 of those, with no rotavirus recommendation, but the median number of vaccines recommended by these countries is 14. Prior to this order, the U.S. also recommended hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, influenza and Covid, bringing the total to 17 vaccines — more than any of those countries. If Trump wanted to bring us directly in line with our peers, he would only have to remove the recommendation for the Covid vaccine. Instead, the executive order takes us down to 11 universally recommended vaccines. You could argue it brings us up to 18 vaccines recommended in any way, but with added complexities and complications. Either way, we’re further from the peer consensus now than we were before.

The order’s reasoning also falls flat philosophically. The administration sees requiring vaccines to attend public school as heavy-handed, and it favors a “trust” versus a “mandate” model for the shots. A voluntary model, it says, is the standard in other countries we ought to emulate — but in reality it’s not all that standard. 13 European countries mandate at least one vaccine, with France, Hungary, and Latvia mandating nearly the full schedule. Meanwhile, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Malta all effectively mandate vaccination for polio (and by extension pertussis). What’s more, the federal government is already taking a light-touch approach to vaccines. States decide for themselves which vaccines to mandate; the CDC only issues recommendations.

If the order’s justifications don’t hold up under scrutiny, the oral statements coming from our leaders right now make even less sense.

President Trump said he’s seen bottles of vaccines the size of a soda bottle “poured into a little child’s body.” I can’t say what’s on his Truth Social feed, but that doesn’t sound like a baby getting vaccinated. Vaccine doses, of course, are much smaller than soda bottles — they’re about a milliliter, so 1,000 times smaller than a liter of soda. But describing vaccines as frightening and overwhelming is hardly new for Trump. He’s expressed fear at the size of vaccine doses many times before, and has on many occasions alleged that these vaccines cause autism.

To me, these statements are bombastic, alarmist and frankly embarrassing, but maybe I’m too sensitive to this issue as a new parent to be able to interpret the president’s statements with maximum charitability. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, was up to the task: When asked about what Trump meant, Kennedy attempted to rationalize the statements by saying the president wasn’t comparing a single dose to the size of a soda bottle but the cumulative doses of vaccines, all 57 of them — or 72, or 84, or 94… you know, whatever. When pressed that even a hundred shots is still far short of that volume, Kennedy pivoted to saying the real important point is that none of these vaccines have been tested in placebo-controlled trials. That would be a good point, except for the fact that many have, and the ones that haven’t can’t be ethically tested that way. For Kennedy, marshalling arguments that sound passable at first and totally collapse under modest scrutiny is nothing new. He’s done this before with measles and Tylenol, and he’s doing it again with children’s vaccine schedule.

I prefer to be calm over being alarmed. I would prefer to conclude with a measured tone and note that this swath of changes is actually moderate, and to say I plan to approach further changes coming out of HHS with an open mind. But I don’t think I could survive being that naive. After the removal of the requirement for the Hepatitis B shot at birth, and the attempted changes to the vaccine schedule, and firing the sitting members of the ACIP vaccine board and allowing this country to bumble Magoo-like towards losing our measles eradication status, Trump and Kennedy don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Again, I’ll ask: Why do this? Why roll back recommendations on vaccines that protect us from some of the worst communicable diseases we’ve ever seen? In the absence of rational reasons, we’re left with the irrational: they’re afraid. And it’s not a well-founded, reason-based fear but a personal and anecdotal one, riding a wave of retrospective anger at Covid-era vaccine mandates to dangerous new horizons. There’s no scientific reasoning to justify this — no new missing link found to connect vaccines and autism, no poisonous vat of vaccine spoiling in a hospital sub-basement, no smoking harpoon Kennedy used to slay his white whale. Just two of our highest-ranking government officials, in a hermetic bubble of sycophancy, vialing up their cumulative zero years of medical experience to inject into our popular discourse.

Take the survey: What do you think about President Trump’s order? Let us know.

Disagree? That’s okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we’ll consider publishing your feedback.

Under the radar.

On Monday, The Los Angeles Times reported that one organization’s polls for a handful of nationally watched races — including last week’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary and the ongoing Los Angeles mayoral runoff — were fabricated. Median Strategies said that its polls were part of a “social experiment” to test how effectively unverified political information can spread. Ahead of Wisconsin’s August 11 primary, Median Strategies showed Francesca Hong ahead by over 20 points, only for her to be defeated by opponent David Crowley. Separately, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) promoted a Median Strategies poll that demonstrated her supposed 12-point lead over Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman (D). On August 17, Median Strategies confirmed the inauthenticity of their polling operation and said it had ceased operations. The Los Angeles Times has the story.

SPONSORED by the penny hoarder

Four bills worth a second look

Car insurance, credit card interest and routine online purchases quietly cost more than they need to, and most people never revisit them. The Penny Hoarder laid out four fixes that take minutes and don’t require giving anything up.

See what they are

The road not taken.

Coming out of last week’s break, we kept a close eye on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to buy specialized gloves that deliver electric shocks, which officers could use to subdue people being detained. The story generated lots of chatter online, but we were somewhat surprised to find limited opinion pieces in news outlets, and we opted to go with stories that generated more robust commentary for this week’s main topics. The “shock gloves” story is still on our radar, particularly if and when they are used in the field.

The extras.

One year ago today we covered E.J. Antoni’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was our new video on the Reflecting Pool renovation.

Nothing to do with politics: An extremely low-budget animated film has become a massive hit in China.

Our last survey: 3,129 readers responded to our survey on U.S. military readiness in light of challenges aboard the USS Lincoln, with 62% saying they are very concerned about the military’s current capability. “These problems start at the top, and we currently have very weak leaders,” one respondent said. “The U.S. has the most powerful and best equipped military forces in the world despite what the media would hope to influence people to believe,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Would you sort through the trash to find a winning lottery ticket? That’s exactly what a team of garbage collectors in the Puglia region of Italy did when one woman, who remains anonymous, realized that she’d accidentally thrown away a €1M (roughly $1.2 million) lottery winner. The lucky lady discarded the ticket after a misunderstanding with her local shop, but was alerted to the mistake by a family member who recognized her numbers. Nicola Toscano, the administrator of the SANB public waste management company in Bitonto, answered the call and worked with his team for over a day to sort through the waste to find the winning stub. The team emerged victorious from the search, with Toscano reporting that the stub was “miraculously still in one piece.” The Guardian has the story.