Trump’s vaccine order is counterproductive and ‘wrong on so many levels,’ GOP lawmaker says

By Julia Benbrook, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, an increasingly sharp critic of President Donald Trump, on Sunday called the president’s vaccine order to separate injections for measles, mumps and rubella “wrong on so many levels” because, among other things, it would require children to receive more shots.

“Let’s just take it from the perspective of the parent,” Cassidy, a doctor who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Now, instead of going to the doctor twice to get their child vaccinated, they have to go six times.”

“Instead of Mom or Dad missing work twice … to take their child to the doctor, they have to miss work or take vacation or personal leave six times,” he added. “This is inconvenient. It’s going to contribute to an increased loss of income.”

“The president’s proposal is going to end up with more children being sick,” Cassidy said.

During a Sunday appearance on ABC News’ “This Week,” the Louisiana senator said: “This is why the president’s poll numbers are down, because you’ve lost sight of affordability for the parent, you’ve lost sight of the convenience for the American family, you’ve lost sight of that which is driving higher costs in health care.”

Cassidy has become an increasingly vocal critic of the president after he lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger, becoming the first GOP senator to lose renomination in close to a decade.

CNN has reached out the White House for a reaction to Cassidy’s criticism.

Trump’s order says the combination vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, called MMR, “should be administered in three separate single-disease shots,” and that all childhood immunizations should be given at separate medical visits.

Immunologists and vaccine experts say there’s no valid reason to do that.

“Nothing bad can happen from what we are doing,” Trump said while speaking in the Oval Office on Monday. “The worst thing that could happen would be nothing happens. We’re not going to lose anything.”

The executive order marked the latest blow for Cassidy, who cast a deciding vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary last year despite deep concerns about his anti-vaccine views.

Ahead of that confirmation vote, Cassidy secured a series of commitments from Kennedy — including that the two would have an “unprecedentedly close collaborative working relationship” and that Kennedy would not seek to undermine the government’s vaccine policies.

But Kennedy began testing that pact within months, overhauling the government’s main vaccine advisory panel and amplifying skepticism of key vaccine policies — all while downplaying what has grown into the worst measles outbreak in the country in decades.

Their already-frosty relationship hit a breaking point late last year, after the abrupt firing of the then-head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kennedy’s subsequent push to revamp the nation’s childhood vaccine schedule.

Kennedy’s allies later joined Trump in openly backing a primary challenge to Cassidy that successfully denied him renomination earlier this spring.

Since then, Cassidy has shown far greater willingness to criticize Trump and Kennedy, opposing the president on key issues such as the Iran war and his effort to establish an “anti-weaponization” fund. Cassidy and Kennedy’s relationship is effectively non-existent, people close to the two men said, and the two have rarely spoken in the last several months.

Still, Cassidy has stressed that despite feeling freer to express his views, his final months in the Senate are not meant to serve as a revenge tour.

That did not prevent him on Sunday from lashing out at the president’s latest policy, which he has also done in a series of social media posts.

“If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that,” Cassidy, told CNN’s Jake Tapper about Trump’s claim that nothing would happen as a result of what experts say is a dramatic reshaping of US vaccine policy.

“As a physician who has seen people either die or get seriously ill from diseases that can be prevented by vaccines, this has the potential to decrease the protection that a child would receive against diseases which can be deadly,” Cassidy said.

He added that if Trump is looking to improve children’s health while helping parents with costs, “this is the wrong thing to do.”

The-CNN-Wire
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