Chicago Public Schools will reopen on Monday. Already before the first bells ring, President Donald Trump’s administration has made our city’s most vulnerable population less safe.
On Aug. 10, Trump, flanked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, told the country that “vats” of vaccine were being “pumped into” children, comparing routine childhood immunizations to the size of a soda bottle. With days until school starts, Chicago parents must now decide who to believe: the pediatricians who have overseen their children’s health since birth or the president and the HHS secretary who lack the scientific expertise to enact vaccine policy.
As a medical student and a pediatric infectious disease physician who care for children on Chicago’s South Side, we do not have the luxury of treating this executive order as political theater. We will be in the exam rooms and on the hospital floors in the weeks ahead, fielding questions from anxious parents that come from a place of care, not ignorance or neglect. Our community carries decades of justified mistrust toward institutions that have not always earned it. But there is a real difference between a parent asking difficult questions and the federal government sowing distrust in agencies charged with protecting children.
The president’s “vats” and vaccine-related autism claims are not supported by science. They are scare tactics targeting parents who rarely interact with the medical system and are the least equipped to challenge it.
The new executive order classifies vaccines into three tiers: those recommended for all children, those recommended for certain “high-risk groups” and others for which shared decision-making is left to parents and doctors. Among the vaccines demoted to the latter two categories are those protecting against meningococcal disease, which can result in death within 24 hours of symptoms showing up, and hepatitis B, which can cause chronic liver disease. This buffet-style selection of vaccines may be manageable for families with easy healthcare access, but for many of the families we serve, a missed vaccine can mean serious, preventable illness.
That risk grows under the administration’s call to split the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, into three separate shots at three visits — a return to the pre-1971 era, before the combined vaccine existed. Single-antigen vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella are not currently available and could take years to develop. Increasing the number of visits for a family does not make vaccination safer; it multiplies the chances that a child falls through the cracks before they are protected against diseases that do not wait for a second or third appointment.
We have sat with parents who missed appointments because a shift changed, a bus was late or a sibling of the child had a fever. Under the current vaccine schedule, a missed visit is a minor setback. Under a schedule requiring more visits, the increased likelihood of missed visits leads to a child starting school without the immunity their classmates are counting on. That risk falls hardest on families with the least room to absorb it, in the name of a “gold standard” that no pediatric medical society or peer-reviewed evidence supports.
This comes amid a measles outbreak threatening the U.S.’s elimination status. Chicago’s citywide student vaccination rate sits barely above the 95% herd-immunity threshold. And even then, there are sharp local gaps: Washington Park is at 87.1% and Fuller Park, 88.2%. Vaccines are a community health measure, not just an individual choice — a child’s protection depends on the immunity of those around them, regardless of the ZIP code or school type. Since 2015, the rate of CPS students out of compliance with at least one vaccine requirement has nearly doubled, from 6.9% to 12.2%, a trend Illinois has tried to counter through a state law aligning state vaccine guidance with the American Academy of Pediatrics. But no state law can undo the psychological damage of a president telling millions of parents, days before the first bell, that their pediatrician’s recommendations are dangerous.
That is why the exam room matters more than ever to pediatric providers. As we care for families over the coming weeks and months for child wellness visits and back-to-school physicals, we cannot let this moment pass in silence. This is not the time to lecture or disengage, but to get curious and reengage. To ask patiently about concerns and address them with facts grounded in science.
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The conversations in our clinic rooms — not the courtroom, not the press box, not even the Oval Office — will decide this moment and the future of pediatric care.
Washington has given parents a sound bite. We owe them a conversation.
Chuka Onuh is a third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Dr. Julia Rosebush is an associate professor of pediatrics in the Section of Infectious Diseases at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital.
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