President Donald Trump repeatedly exaggerated the number of vaccines recommended for small children, comparing it with vaccinating a horse.
“They give — I mean, for a little baby to be injected with that much fluid?” Trump first said Sept. 21 during an Air Force One press gaggle. “Even beyond the actual ingredients, they have sometimes 80 different vaccines … It’s like you’re shooting up a horse.”
He used the number four more times during a Sept. 22 press conference in which he also pushed an unproven link between autism and Tylenol.
“You have a little child, little fragile child, that you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess, 80 different blends, and they pump it in,” he said.
Then again: “It’s like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines and 80. Then you give that to a little kid.”
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How many vaccines do young children actually receive? It’s not 80, by any measure.
The White House didn’t respond to our questions about how Trump arrived at that number. But because Trump’s comments referred to “little” kids and babies, we tallied the overall number of recommended childhood vaccines for children ages 10 and under in four ways: by the number of vaccine formulations a child receives; by the number of diseases the vaccines protect against; by the total number of doses each child receives of all the recommended vaccine formulations; and by the number of physical injections or shots a child would receive if following the recommended vaccination schedule.
No matter how we counted, the number of vaccines a young child receives didn’t reach Trump’s claim of 80.
CDC schedule recommends 11 vaccines for kids 10 and younger
Over a child’s first year of life, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends seven different vaccine formulationsplus an annual flu vaccine. They are:
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Hepatitis B
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RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), if not yet given to the mother in pregnancy
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DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis)
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Polio
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Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type B)
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PCV (Pneumococcal disease)
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Rotavirus
By age 2, children will get their first of two doses of varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A and MMR (measles, mumps, rubella).
By age 6, children who follow the recommended vaccination schedule and receive all doses of the 10 recommended vaccines will be fully vaccinated against 14 diseases.
Starting when a baby is 6 months old, annual flu vaccines are recommended with two doses the first time. That bumps the total to 11 vaccines, and 15 diseases.
Trump’s CDC no longer recommends annual COVID-19 vaccination for all children but patients can still receive the vaccine after consulting with a health care provider. The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, approved the vaccine for kids 6 months and older with underlying health conditions.
The American Academy of Pediatricswhich publishes its own vaccine schedule, still recommends annual COVID-19 vaccines for all people 6 months and older. If including COVID-19 vaccines, the total vaccines for children comes to 12, with some protection against 16 diseases.
The next batch of vaccines starts when children are 11 to 13 years old. Up to four more vaccines are recommended at this age to protect against HPV (human papillomavirus) and meningococcal types A, C, W, and Y. Children in this age group also get a tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis booster called Tdap. If they are at high risk, children this age are also recommended to get the meningococcal B vaccine.
When it comes to total doses for children 10 and under, the US vaccine schedule calls for 30 to 52
Many childhood vaccines are not given all at once, but spread out over several doses.
For example, the CDC recommends three doses of the hepatitis B vaccine, one at birth, and one each at 2 and 6 months. Other vaccines are given in up to four to five separate doses. Sometimes the same vaccine can be administered in a two- or three-dose series.
“For most vaccines, multiple doses are because we’ve shown that fewer doses than whatever is in the schedule is not fully protective,” said Dr. James Campbell, a University of Maryland pediatrician and infectious disease expert. The reasons behind timing and frequency of doses depends on the vaccine.
Take DTaP. The first three doses given to infants trains their immune system to recognize and defend against the infection. Those doses do create a protective response, but the more long-lasting protection comes when they get a booster as toddlers. “They make more mature, what we call memory B cells, which means long lasting protection,” said Campbell, “So if a long time after that, they were to be exposed, they would then be able to respond.”
In the case of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, the second recommended dose isn’t meant to boost but rather catch “primary failures,” or the 2% to 7% of people who don’t get an immune response from the first dose.
“It’s just a matter of what induces the best immune response,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and infectious disease expert.
We added up all the doses recommended in the childhood vaccine schedule for kids 10 and under. Assuming the most robust dosing series (for example, opting for a four-dose series over a three-dose series), a 10-year-old could receive 30 doses of vaccines. That would be 52 doses if a child receives every single annual flu and COVID-19 vaccine, including two of each their first year.
The closest we got to the 80 vaccines that Trump referenced was to count every single dose of every vaccine separately, including each annual flu and COVID-19 shot from birth to age 18. That adds up to 72 doses, half of which are COVID-19 and flu, among all kids, including tweens and teenagers, not only the little kids and babies that Trump talked about.
Different vaccine doses are often administered together in one shot
Fifty-two vaccine doses rarely means 52 shots in a kid’s arm. That’s because many childhood vaccine doses can be delivered in combination vaccinesin which one syringe can contain several vaccines. Other times vaccines can be given orally, like rotavirusor via nasal spray, like the flu vaccine.
Here’s an example: A baby at its two-month appointment is recommended to get doses of six different vaccines. Using a combination vaccine, the child can receive all six vaccinations in the form of two injections and one oral administration by way of drops.
“We’ve worked for a long time, over decades, to figure out which vaccines can go together in the same needle and syringe and still be safe and still immunogenic and protective, meaning you don’t have any worse protection by putting them together,” Campbell said.
Vaccines such as MMR are offered only as a combination in the U.S.
“We agree that we want to reduce the number of shots,” said Dr. Flor Muñoz, associate professor of pediatrics, infectious diseases and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine. “We’ve been successful at doing that with combination vaccines to protect against more diseases.”
Using combination vaccines does not overload children’s bodies with “liquid” as Trump was concerned about though. For infants, the standard is, at most, half a milliliter to a milliliter — or about 1/10 to 1/5 of one teaspoon. “It’s tiny, and babies tolerate it perfectly fine,” Campbell said.
Our ruling
On multiple occasions Trump said “little” kids and “little” babies are given “80 different vaccines.”
According to the current CDC recommended vaccine schedule, a 10-year-old child could receive up to 12 different vaccine formulations, protecting from 16 different diseases. Those vaccines could be administered in up to 52 separate doses, but almost certainly less than 52 injections because many vaccines are delivered in one shot.
None of those numbers equals 80 different vaccines. We rate this claim False.
