The Trump administration has made sweeping changes to vaccine policy over the past year justified by invocations of patients’ “personal autonomy.” In January, Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump’s slashed the number of routinely recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11 after an HHS report emphasized “personal autonomy and self-determination” as key principles necessitating reconsideration of the childhood vaccine schedule.
That same month, Trump’s new head of the federal government’s vaccine panel opined that all childhood vaccines might be optional in schools on similar reasoning: “What we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order,” Kirk Milhoan said, noting that we allow people to make various choices, like unhealthy alcohol consumption, even if there are risks.
