Vaccine makers would need to revive doses dormant in U.S. for decades
A federal executive order signed by President Donald Trump calls for separating combination vaccines — including the measles, mumps and rubella shot — into individual injections, a move that would require drugmakers to revive vaccines not marketed separately in the United States for decades and to construct new manufacturing capacity.
The order, announced Monday, targets the federal approach to childhood vaccinations. Its text instructs that combination vaccines be broken into their component shots, and that “appointments for that and other vaccinations should be spaced out whenever possible.”
The MMR shot is composed of three vaccines — measles, mumps and rubella — that have long been delivered in routine pediatric practice as a single combined injection. Under the order’s separation directive, those vaccines would be administered as three separate injections.
To comply with the separation requirement, drugmakers would have to revive a slate of individual vaccines that have not been produced as standalone products in the U.S. for decades. They would also have to build new manufacturing plants capable of producing millions more vaccine doses than the country currently uses.
The manufacturing demands flow directly from the order’s combined requirements. Combination vaccines currently allow pediatricians to deliver multiple immunizations in a single visit; delivering those same immunizations separately, on a stretched-out timetable, would require substantially more total doses to fully immunize a child.
Public health experts have been quick to condemn the order. The biggest obstacles, they told the Associated Press, “may be the unprecedented financial and logistical challenges” the directive would impose “on parents, health providers and drugmakers.”