On May 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Realigning United States Core Childhood Vaccine Recommendations with Best Practices from Peer, Developed Countries” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/realigning-united-states-core-childhood-vaccine-recommendations-with-best-practices-from-peer-developed-countries/).

The headline is exactly what vaccine policy reformers have wanted for years. By this order, the federal government is now directed, as a matter of stated national policy, to bring the American childhood vaccine schedule into line with the schedules used by Japan, Denmark, Germany, and the rest of the developed world. Hallelujah!

I have been working toward that result on several fronts. In Thomas v. Monarez in the District of Columbia, I represent two physicians and a health-freedom organization asking a federal court to declare the CDC’s universal Category A framework arbitrary and capricious and to move childhood vaccines to shared clinical decision-making until the CDC studies the cumulative safety of the full schedule. The complaint rests on the same comparison the President’s order now invokes: seventeen EU nations, the UK, and Japan run voluntary programs with fewer vaccines and over ninety percent coverage. (Yet nonetheless, the Government has moved to dismiss the Thomas case, and the decision by the judge is pending, so it’s a little head scratching)

So that’s the (mostly) good news, and I wish the story ended here, but it doesn’t. Let’s look at the wording of the EO and then go into why it’s much less than meets the eye.

What the Executive Order Actually Says

The order directs the CDC and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review the January 2026 CDC scientific assessment and the latest clinical data and, “to the extent permitted by law, take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule.”

It tells ACIP’s review to consider ways to give parents and doctors maximum flexibility on the timing and sequencing of routine immunizations. It preserves insurance coverage and the federal programs for everything currently on the schedule. And it contains the standard provision that it creates no enforceable rights. But still, this is seriously good language for people on this side of the vaccine mandate issue.

Two phrases carry the weight. The first is “ACIP.” The order routes the schedule change through the advisory committee rather than around it. The second is “to the extent permitted by law.” That qualifier is doing enormous work, because at this moment the law permits very little, and probably nothing.

How We Got Here: The January Move from Recommended to Shared Clinical Decision-Making

The machinery the order plugs into was already running. On December 5, 2025, the President issued a memorandum directing HHS to compare the U.S. schedule against peer nations. HHS produced its scientific assessment, authored by Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, on January 2, 2026, finding that the United States recommends more childhood vaccines than any peer nation. On January 5, 2026, acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill signed a decision memorandum adopting the assessment and reducing the number of diseases covered by the childhood schedule from seventeen to eleven, moving several vaccines to shared clinical decision-making and limiting others to high-risk groups.

That January cut is the policy the new executive order is trying to revive. It is also the policy that ran straight into a federal injunction.

What AAP Did

In July 2025, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical organizations sued Secretary Kennedy and various other government officials, in the District of Massachusetts, over his May 2025 order pulling the COVID recommendation for pregnant women and healthy children. AAP amended the complaint repeatedly as Kennedy reconstituted ACIP and as the votes and the January schedule cut came down.

By early 2026 the suit had become a broad challenge to the reconstitution of the committee and to every schedule change that followed. AAP and the medical societies asked the court to undo all of it and restore the prior schedule via a motion for a preliminary injunction. CHD and the other plaintiffs in the Shaw v. AAP case tried to intervene as defendants, because the government was not vigorously defending the substantive decisions it was making, but only its power to make them. The court denied our motion to intervene in late February 2026.

What Judge Murphy Did

On March 16, 2026, Judge Brian Murphy granted preliminary relief against the government. The order runs forty-five pages, but the operative part is three sentences at the end. The court stayed the January 2026 Memo under the APA. It stayed the appointments of thirteen of the fifteen ACIP members, the ones Kennedy appointed on June 11, September 11, and January 13. And it stayed every vote the reconstituted committee had taken.

The court’s theory on the schedule was statutory. Congress wrote ACIP into the Affordable Care Act, the Medicaid statute, the veterans’ health benefits statute, and the Vaccines for Children program. Each ties a federal obligation to a recommendation from ACIP. Reading the CDC Director’s general authority to “assist” and “advise” states as license to bypass ACIP entirely would render all of those specific statutes surplusage. So, Director O’Neill, the court held, lacked authority to revise the schedule without ACIP, and acted contrary to law.

The court’s theory on the committee was based on the Federal Advisory Committee Act (“FACA”). ACIP’s charter requires members with expertise in immunization practices, vaccines, vaccine research, or vaccine safety and efficacy. Of the fifteen sitting members, the court found most of the Kennedy appointed members to be “distinctly unqualified.”

Here is the part that answers the question everyone asks. Judge Murphy did not enjoin ACIP from meeting. He considered that and rejected it as too intrusive. He stayed thirteen of fifteen appointments instead and explained that the stay does the work by subtraction. While those appointments are stayed, he wrote, “ACIP as currently constituted cannot meet, for how can a committee meet without nearly the entirety of its membership?” Thirteen seats frozen out of fifteen. Two members cannot form a quorum. The committee is disabled, not by an order forbidding it to convene, but by the removal of nearly everyone who would convene it.

We Made the Case for the ACIP Members, But No One Was Listening

There is a piece of this I worked on directly. At footnote 56 of his order, Judge Murphy left a door open. He wrote that there might be evidence showing each challenged member had more relevant expertise than what was before him, but that the government had supplied none, relying only on the summary of credentials on the ACIP website.

The government never walked through that door. I did.

After Murphy’s order, on April 1, 2026, the Secretary filed a renewed ACIP charter as part of FACA’s two-year renewal cycle. The renewed charter expanded the listed expertise categories to include fields like pediatric neurodevelopment, data science, statistical analysis, health economics, toxicology, and recovery from serious vaccine injuries.

In a declaration filed with a stay motion, I took the challenged members one by one and tied each to the renewed charter’s categories. Dr. Hibbeln, the NIH neuroscientist, to pediatric neurodevelopment. Dr. Levi, the MIT risk analyst, to data science and statistical analysis. Dr. Milhoan, the pediatric cardiologist whose doctorate is in myocardial inflammation, to the evaluation of the dominant adverse-event signal from the mRNA vaccines. The argument was simple. You do not test a cumulative vaccine schedule with vaccinologists alone. You test it with the disciplines needed to answer the questions the Institute of Medicine said were unanswered, which are the disciplines the renewed charter added.

Obviously, all of this should have come from the government, but it didn’t, so someone had to try to bring it to the court’s attention. I did, but it didn’t work. Judge Murphy denied our attempt to stay his decision on a technical procedural ground and never reached my substantive defense of the ACIP members’ qualifications.

The New Charter Collapses

Then the ground moved again, and this time it moved under my own filing. On May 18, 2026, HHS withdrew the April 6 renewal with the expanded categories of ACIP member expertise. The Federal Register notice (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/19/2026-10012/advisory-committee-on-immunization-practices-acip-notice-of-charter-re-establishment) (91 FR 29139) is blunt about why. The April renewal was “withdrawn due to an administrative error in meeting the revised public notification timing requirements under the revised Federal Advisory Committee Act regulations, as amended in December 2025.” The notice also reinstated the charter in effect when Kennedy took office.

Will the administration amend the charter to bring back the expanded expertise requirements? That is a good question, but I have no idea of the answer.

The Executive Order Meets a Locked Door

Now put the May 29 Executive Order on top of all of this.

The EO tells CDC and ACIP to update the schedule, to the extent permitted by law. As of today, whatever the law says on a general level has to be read in conjunction with Judge Murphy’s stay of the appointment of the members necessary for a quorum for ACIP to do anything. And everything HHS, CDC, and ACIP has done regarding the vaccine schedule has been stayed as well.

There is an irony worth naming. The legal problem Murphy identified was that the January schedule bypassed ACIP. The EO’s answer is to route the new schedule through ACIP, which concedes Murphy’s central premise that ACIP has to originate recommendations. The administration is trying to fix the defect the right way. It has simply pointed a presidential directive at a committee that Judge Murphy says cannot act.

Some commentators, Dr. Robert Malone among them, read the order the other way, as a move to shift authority back to elected officials, with ACIP relegated to a purely advisory role. I do not think the text supports that. Mechanically, the order does not have the President or the Secretary set the schedule and treat ACIP as optional. Murphy reads Section 2(b) as routing the schedule updates through ACIP’s review and recommendation. That is the opposite of sidelining the committee. It accepts, rather than challenges, the very premise Murphy rested on, that ACIP must originate the recommendation before the Director can adopt it. If the administration believed the schedule could be set without ACIP, it would have said so. Instead, it pointed the whole process back at ACIP.

What the Order May Mean, and What It May Not

To the good: the executive branch has now committed itself, in writing and at the highest level, to the vaccine policy that most of the industrialized world follows. That is real. It tells the agencies, the states, and the courts where the administration stands, and it frames the January assessment as the guiding federal resource.

If and when ACIP can lawfully act, the order points it directly at the cumulative-safety and timing-and-sequencing questions that reformers, and the Institute of Medicine before them, have raised for two decades.

To the bad: in the near term, and during most of the time this administration has left in office, most likely there will be no changes to the ACIP-recommended vaccine schedule, unless the government decides it actually wants to make changes. That requires HHS to seat enough qualified members to survive Murphy’s FACA analysis, or to win reversal in the First Circuit, and very likely to re-file the expanded charter with proper notice this time.

None of that is impossible. The expanded charter can come back, correctly noticed. The First Circuit can narrow or reverse the injunction. New members can be appointed. The door is locked today, and it may stay locked, but it’s not welded shut.

Where This Goes Next

I expect AAP and its confreres to wait (despite some noises from them to the contrary. AAP’s counsel has told the press that the group is “assessing the legal implications” of the order because, in his words, it flies in the face of Judge Murphy’s ruling. But assessing is not suing. A direct challenge to the executive order itself would be premature. The order creates no enforceable rights by its own terms, and it is aimed at a committee that cannot currently function, so there is nothing yet to enjoin. The ripe target is the schedule ACIP eventually produces, if it produces one.

But if it looks like CDC will try to get back on track for making the much-needed reforms, we will see a Sixth Amended Complaint, a second preliminary injunction motion, and round two before Judge Murphy. Maybe this time the government presents a vigorous defense of the ACIP members and defends the merits to try to effectuate the President’s EO.

A Point of Contrast

In a case against the Department of Homeland Security challenging the government’s policy of deporting illegal aliens to countries other than their country of origin, Judge Murphy issued a preliminary injunction against the policy in April 2025. The First Circuit denied the government’s request for a stay a month later. The government took the case up on an emergency application to the Supreme Court, which issued a stay of Judge Murphy’s decision less than seventy days after his injunction. The lesson is that when the government wants to act fast, it acts fast. When it doesn’t, but wants to show concern, it talks.

Here, the government did ask Judge Murphy for a stay, but only a stay of the proceedings, not of the injunction. Its argument was that pausing the litigation would not harm the plaintiffs, because, as it told the court, it was not seeking to stay the injunction at all. The plaintiffs would keep their order, their alleged harm would remain remedied, so there was no reason not to pause the case while the government decided whether to appeal. Murphy rejected the request anyway, forcefully and correctly. The government’s own filing made a representation worth holding onto. It was not asking to stay the injunction. The injunction therefore governs while the appeal proceeds, by the government’s own choice, and the appeal will take a long time. The same government that got a Supreme Court reversal of Judge Murphy’s injunction in sixty-six days, told the judge it was not even asking to stay this one.

In sum,

For now, the EO is a heartwarming (to some) statement of where the administration wants to go. The road to get there runs through a committee that, as of this writing, cannot take a step., and all the previous work done by Kennedy, HHS, the CDC and ACIP has been stopped dead in its tracks.

It seems pretty clear that the Secretary is fighting parts of the administration as well as the pro-vaccine Mafia. However, he is a very smart and effective fellow. I suspect, and hope, he has a play, and I think he has been giving some hints of what that is.

We shall see.

Rick Jaffe, Esq.