Studies have shown no connection between COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy and increased risk of miscarriage. Despite this, Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson resurrected a long-debunked claim of an astronomical rate of miscarriage after vaccination while also accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of deceiving the public about the safety of the shots during pregnancy.

On Aug. 10, the lawmakers released texts from the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s government-issued cell phone from January 2021.

“Privately over text, Fauci admitted concerns about COVID vaccine side effects ‘associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,’ yet told the public there was nothing to worry about,” Paul, of Kentucky, said in an Aug. 11 post on X. “Once again, we expose Fauci’s dishonesty.”

“The safety signals, the red flags, were screaming at these people, and you got Anthony Fauci there lying bold-faced to the American public,” Johnson, a senator from Wisconsin, said in an Aug. 12 Fox News appearance.

“We will never know how many babies were miscarried because of Fauci’s lies,” Johnson said in an X post the following day.

In a video accompanying Paul’s post and in an Aug. 10 press release, the senators juxtaposed a single text from Fauci about a theoretical concern about vaccination and miscarriage  — which was not subsequently borne out by data — with a series of public comments from Fauci between Feb. 3, 2021 and Aug. 30, 2021.

The senators’ claims of deception are missing key context, both on what Fauci said and how information on maternal vaccine safety evolved in the months after the COVID-19 vaccines were first authorized, as we will explain.

“By January and February of 2021, we knew that COVID infection during pregnancy increased the risk of pregnancy loss and other pregnancy complications, such as pre-eclampsia,” Victoria Male, an associate professor of reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told us in an email. “On the other hand, the limited evidence we had about the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy was reassuring, and evidence was accumulating rapidly.”

Paul and Johnson also resurfaced a claim that a study found an 82% rate of miscarriages after COVID-19 vaccination — a falsehood that some other Republican politicians amplified. We originally fact-checked this claim, based on an incorrect calculation from vaccine safety monitoring data, in 2021.

Meanwhile, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Martha MacCallum during an Aug. 11 Fox News interview that it is “certainly possible” that COVID-19 vaccines could have led to miscarriages. He also said that the debate about miscarriage and COVID-19 vaccines “rages on in the scientific literature.”

Those claims are unsupported. “The current data continue to show no increased risk of miscarriage (or any other pregnancy complication) associated with COVID-19 vaccination,” Male said.

We asked the NIH for more information on the literature Bhattacharya was referring to, but we did not receive a reply. Paul’s office did not reply to our request for comment.

Johnson’s communications director, Grace Carnathan, did not directly defend the 82% figure. “The question isn’t what the actual percentage of miscarriage risk is — we probably will never know because of grossly inadequate and negligent, if not corrupt, safety surveillance,” she said. “The question should be why federal health officials consistently withheld information on safety signals, thereby depriving the public of fully informed consent.” 

Citing the testimony of a gynecologist who has made incorrect claims before, she maintained that “there is controversy over what the data shows” and that “Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know.”

What Fauci’s Early Texts and Interviews Show

Fauci’s January 2021 texts, which shared reassuring information alongside the theoretical concern Paul and Johnson highlighted, were sent the month after the first two COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorizations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical organizations at the time did not make a recommendation as to whether people should get vaccinated during pregnancy, citing a lack of data.

The posted exchange begins on Jan. 25, 2021, with then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy asking Fauci and then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky if they are “aware of any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs late in pregnancy would be preferred.”

At first, Fauci replied that there was none. But a bit later that day, he said, “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of. Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

High fever is associated with certain poor outcomes in pregnancy, as we will explain below, although it’s not clear it can cause miscarriage. The term cytokine storm isn’t strictly defined, although it generally refers to a level of severe inflammatory response that isn’t seen after COVID-19 vaccination, but can occur with severe COVID-19. Vaccination triggers an immune response that temporarily increases the levels of certain cytokines to coordinate that response, but not to the degree of a cytokine storm.

“In January 2021, when there was very little evidence about the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy, it was sensible to be cautious and consider the theoretical possibility that fever associated with vaccination might be harmful in pregnancy,” Male said. 

“Subsequent evidence found no increased risk of pregnancy loss, or any other pregnancy problems that might be caused by fever, following vaccination,” she added.

The day after passing along the point about fever, Fauci shared his overall thoughts on COVID-19 vaccination and pregnancy in the text message thread.

“I would say that in any vaccine in which data are lacking in pregnant women one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits,” he said. “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy. In the vaccine trials, pregnant women were not allowed but following the EUA, a large number (more than 10,000) pregnant women have been vaccinated. No issues have arisen.” 

Fauci went on to acknowledge recommendations giving pregnant women a “choice” on whether to get vaccinated while adding that toxicity studies in animals “did not raise any red flags.”

Paul and Johnson portrayed Fauci’s private comments as contrasting with his public ones. But while he did not publicly mention risks of fever during pregnancy in the interviews we reviewed, his contemporaneous statements in fact hewed fairly closely to his Jan. 26 text message.

Fauci accurately shared on several occasions in late January and February that in the data on people vaccinated during pregnancy to date, there were no “red flags” — comments the senators highlighted in their video and press release. He also repeatedly noted that the vaccines had not been tested in clinical trials on pregnant women and described the need to weigh the benefits versus potential risks, given the dangers of COVID-19 during pregnancy.

Male, who was tracking data on pregnancy and COVID-19 vaccination in early 2021, explained that data on the subject grew quickly. Originally, scientists knew that among the few dozen people who got pregnant while participating in the clinical trials, “there was no difference in the rate of miscarriage between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups,” she said. 

As the vaccine rolled out after the original two EUAs in December 2020, U.S. health agencies tracked outcomes. As of Feb. 28, 2021, “35,691 people had been vaccinated during pregnancy and spontaneous reporting to VAERS did not suggest any safety concerns,” Male said, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

A day later, a CDC scientist presented data to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from multiple vaccine safety monitoring systems, finding that thus far, miscarriage and other pregnancy outcomes did not appear to be elevated. 

“So even by the end of February, we were beginning to have good, reassuring data on the safety of COVID vaccination in pregnancy – although of course we got lots more later,” Male said. 

Fauci’s Comments Evolved With the Evidence

To give an impression of duplicity, Paul and Johnson misleadingly mixed Fauci’s comments from different time periods, following a pattern of deception Paul has used before. The video Paul posted sandwiched an abbreviated version of Fauci’s more tempered comments from early 2021 between comments from around six months later.

During this interval, the data supporting vaccination during pregnancy had continued to mount. By mid-August 2021, many medical organizations and the CDC had endorsed vaccination for pregnant people. 

At the time, the U.S. was experiencing the Delta wave of the pandemic, and data would go on to show that this was a particularly dangerous phase of the pandemic for those who were pregnant and unvaccinated. Such people had higher rates of preterm birth and stillbirth than had been seen previously.

“It’s very, very clear that it is safe in pregnant women,” the video shows Fauci stating on the “Today” show on Aug. 12, the day after the CDC recommended that pregnant people get vaccinated. In that interview, Fauci cites “the extraordinary amount of data now that’s accumulated with pregnant women” demonstrating safety, as well as the harms of COVID-19 to the woman and the fetus.

“It’s pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated,” Fauci said during an interview posted Aug. 30, which was highlighted in both the video and press release.

The Facts on Fever in Pregnancy

Fauci’s January 2021 comment was also in keeping with longstanding general knowledge that fever can be associated with risks during pregnancy — a fact that prominent guidance on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy shared at the time.

“The complication of pregnancy that is most closely associated with fever is congenital abnormalities,” or birth defects, Male said. She explained that primarily because of this, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises that pregnant people take acetaminophen, or Tylenol, if they have a fever, in consultation with a doctor.

Since the beginning of the vaccine rollout, this recommendation has included pregnant people who get a fever following COVID-19 vaccination. “Pregnant women who experience fever following vaccination should be counseled to take acetaminophen, as fever has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes,” December 2020 guidance from ACOG and the CDC both said. Both the CDC and the medical organization continue to recommend treating fever in consultation with a doctor, including after COVID-19 vaccination.

That said, birth defects “are associated specifically with high fevers (higher than would be expected from vaccination) early in the first trimester,” Male said. And indeed, studies have not gone on to show COVID-19 vaccination in the first trimester is associated with an increased risk of birth defects, she added.

Male explained that when it comes to miscarriage, fever itself may not even be what increases the risk. “Some infections that cause fever also increase the risk of miscarriage, but it isn’t clear that the fever (or the cytokines that cause the fever) are causing miscarriage in these cases: it could well be other aspects of the infection,” she said.

Persistent, False Claim of High Miscarriage Rate

Despite data that has failed to show that COVID-19 vaccination increases miscarriage risk, Johnson and Paul in their press release elevated a false claim of an 82% miscarriage rate after COVID-19 vaccination. The senators highlighted a January 2022 letter on the topic from Dr. James A. Thorp, an gynecologist whose erroneous and misleading claims we have written about before. 

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, repeated the false statistic on X on Aug. 12, while referring to an episode of his podcast titled in part, “Bombshell Data: Fauci Covered up that Covid Vaccine Produced 82% Miscarriage Rate.” The post and podcast were subsequently taken down, and Cruz noted a correction on his podcast, although he maintained that the broader point about Fauci was still true.

Rep. Lisa McClain, a Republican from Michigan, falsely claimed on Fox Business on Aug. 11 that “in fact, The New England Journal of Medicine said 82% of women who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage.” (The next day, the host of the show followed up to “clarify” the segment.)

We first wrote about the 82% claim in July 2021, when it was circulating in multiple online posts. As we explained at the time, the statistic relies on distortion of CDC data in a New England Journal of Medicine study published in April 2021 that summarized early information on COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.

The study tracked results for 827 people who got vaccinated during pregnancy between December 2020 and the end of February 2021 and had already completed their pregnancies by the end of March, preliminarily finding that 104 had miscarriages. The false claim of an 82% miscarriage rate comes from dividing the 104 miscarriages by the 127 people in the study who got vaccinated in the first or second trimester — a calculation that the paper did not present.

It’s an improper calculation because most people vaccinated during the first or second trimester would not have yet had time to complete their pregnancies unless their pregnancies ended early.

“It’s like calculating a school’s dropout rate in October by looking only at the students who have already left,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Medicine, said in an Aug. 11 X post explaining the claim.

Dr. Eve C. Feinberg, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told us in July 2021 that the 82% was “pure number manipulation and propaganda” and “a ridiculous claim and simply not observed clinically.”

A subsequent paper was published in September 2021, also based on the CDC data, showing a miscarriage rate of lower than 15%, which the researchers said was not higher than expected during pregnancy. Miscarriage is common, especially early in pregnancy.

A final analysis of CDC pregnancy monitoring data, published in February 2026, found a miscarriage rate of 10.79%. “It looked at the week-by-week risk of miscarriage in 12,097 people vaccinated before they were 20 weeks pregnant, finding that there was no increased risk,” Male said.

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In Alaska’s tossup Senate race, Democrat Mary Peltola has put out a new ad misleadingly accusing Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of casting “the deciding vote” to keep the Epstein files “hidden.” While Sullivan voted against considering an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill that would have released the files earlier, he, like the rest of the Senate, supported a bill to make the records public. 

The Peltola ad also seeks to tie Sullivan to the late convicted sex offender through donations from “Epstein associates.” The Peltola campaign points to donations from two people to Sullivan’s campaign who were either listed in Epstein’s contact list or are referenced in Epstein emails that have been publicly released. Neither is alleged to have committed any crimes in connection with Epstein.

The ad also criticizes Sullivan for taking money from a man accused of sex trafficking. Sullivan did accept small campaign donations from a Republican political operative accused in February of sex trafficking. But the donations came before the charges had come to light. And soon after the man’s arrest, the Sullivan campaign donated the contributions to a local charity.

Meanwhile, the Sullivan campaign put out a press release on Aug. 10 highlighting a news story from a conservative publication that claims Peltola has accepted more than $140,000 in campaign contributions from “associates of Jeffrey Epstein.” But none of the alleged “associates” have been charged with any crimes, and some of them — while mentioned in various investigative records or Epstein email chains — have tangential associations with Epstein.

Attempting to link political opponents to Epstein has been a frequent campaign tactic this political season from candidates of both parties.

Peltola, who served for two and a half years in the House, is challenging Sullivan for his Senate seat. An open “jungle” primary guided by Alaska’s ranked-choice voting will be held on Aug. 18. The top four vote-getters will advance to the November general election. The race is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.

Sullivan’s Votes on Release of Epstein Files

The narrator in the Peltola ad asks, “Who’s the real Dan Sullivan? Sullivan claimed the Epstein files should be released, but when it came time to vote, Sullivan cast the deciding vote to keep them hidden.”

The ad focuses on Sullivan’s Sept. 10 vote to table an amendment Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer proposed to a National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment sought to compel the attorney general to make “publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to the investigations of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of helping Epstein recruit, groom and abuse minors.

Despite having said during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would have “no problem” making the Epstein files public, by the summer of 2025, Trump sought to tamp down calls for release of the files.

“I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” Trump said on July 15, 2025. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring. And I don’t understand why it keeps going.” He said it was “only pretty bad people, including fake news” that wanted to keep the issue alive.

Later that same month, Amanda Coyne, a spokesperson for Sullivan, released a prepared statement saying, “President Trump directed the DOJ and AG Bondi to release grand jury transcripts related to the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. Senator Sullivan believes the DOJ should release as much information as possible on Epstein’s horrific crimes, while protecting victims.”

Sullivan’s vote in September helped deny Schumer’s amendment from moving forward to debate. The final vote, which came down mostly along partisan lines, was 51-49 to table the motion.

Sullivan released a statement at the time, saying in part that he “has repeatedly said that he believes the DOJ should release as much information as possible on Epstein’s horrific crimes, while protecting survivors.” The statement added, “Chuck Schumer tried slipping the Epstein provision into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), knowing full well it would be stripped out as the bill went through the process, leaving no doubt he’s using Epstein’s atrocious crimes as a political pawn.”

Legislators in the House, including several Republicans, continued to push for release of the Epstein files — which Trump initially attempted to thwart. But Trump ultimately relented and on Nov. 16 posted on Truth Social that he would not oppose legislation to release the Epstein files because “we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics. … I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”

On Nov. 18, the House passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act that required “the Department of Justice (DOJ) to publish (in a searchable and downloadable format) all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in DOJ’s possession that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein.” And a day later, on Nov. 19, the bill passed in the Senate via unanimous consent. So, Sullivan ultimately supported the release of the files. That day, Trump signed it into law.

Donations from Epstein ‘Associates’

The Peltola ad goes on to say that “shortly after voting against releasing the files, Sullivan received nearly $10,000 from two known Epstein associates.”

According to the Peltola campaign, the ad refers to two donations. The largest of the two is an $8,500 donation made by Henry Kravis, the founder of the private equity firm KKR, to the Sullivan Victory committee on April 1. Vanity Fair reported in 2019 that Kravis showed up in Epstein’s so-called “little black book” of names and contact information kept by Epstein. Although his name comes up in some of the Epstein emails released by the Department of Justice, he has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

The second donation referenced in the Peltola ad is a $693 donation made by real estate magnate Howard Lorber to Alaskans for Dan Sullivan on June 28. Lorber is referenced in emails from the released Epstein files related to some real estate deals contemplated by Epstein. The left-leaning Meidas News highlighted one email released by the House Oversight Committee in which Epstein in 2018 suggested Lorber as one of a handful of “heavy hitters” for his proposed “war council” to help Trump in his response to the Russia collusion investigation. But there is no evidence that such a “war council” ever materialized, or that Lorber ever participated. Nor has Lorber ever been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

While the ad notes that these donations came after Sullivan’s September 2025 vote against the Schumer amendment to compel the release of the Epstein files, they also came after Sullivan voted — along with all other members of the Senate — for the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025.

Donations from Man Later Accused of Sex Trafficking

The ad goes on to say, “Even worse, Sullivan also took money from a political insider arrested on charges of sex trafficking.”

On Feb. 20, the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Alaska announced the arrest of Craig Scott Valdez on charges related to using “the popular social media application Snapchat to identify, groom and entice juvenile females in Alaska for the purposes of sexual exploitation.”

At the time of his arrest, Valdez was the chief of staff for Republican Alaska state Sen. George Rauscher.

Valdez was charged with one count each of sex trafficking of children; sexual exploitation of children (production of child pornography); coercion and enticement of children; and receipt of child pornography.

Federal Election Commission records show Valdez contributed a total of $149 to Sullivan’s Senate campaign — $100 in August 2024 and $49 in September 2025.

The later contribution came five months before Valdez was charged in February 2026. Upon learning of the arrest, Sullivan’s campaign told us it donated Valdez’s contributions to the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault.  FEC records show a donation from the campaign to the charity on Feb. 27.

Sullivan’s Counter Accusations

A post on Sullivan’s campaign website highlights an article in the conservative publication Townhall, saying it alleges Peltola “has accepted more than $140,000 in campaign contributions from individuals the outlet identifies as associates of Jeffery Epstein across her campaigns for House and Senate.”

According to the Aug. 7 Townhall story, “One of those donors is Reid Hoffman, who visited Epstein’s island multiple times. Tim Zagat and his wife Nina also had social connections with Epstein, and Tim Zagat flew on Epstein’s private jet to a 2002 TED Conference in Monterey. They donated $13,000 to Peltola’s campaigns. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who attended dinners with Epstein at the invitation of Google co-founder Sergey Brin; he donated more than $6,000 to Peltola. Melissa French-Gates is the ex-wife of Bill Gates, who appeared numerous times in the Epstein files; she gave Peltola’s campaigns $9,500.”

As we have written, Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a well-known Democratic donor, had meetings with Epstein as late as 2018. He said this year that he knew Epstein “because of a fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret.” Hoffman’s donations to Peltola came in 2023 and 2024, when Peltola was running for a House seat.

None of the “associates” listed in the story have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

A spokesperson for the Peltola campaign said the donations highlighted by the Townhall article “fall into two buckets.”

The first is contributions made to Peltola’s “past congressional campaigns before the Epstein files were released.” And the second are “contributions from donors like Melinda Gates and Steven Spielberg who were only incidentally named in the files but were not actually associated with Epstein.”

The Peltola campaign told us it is in the process of donating Tim and Nina Zagat’s 2026 contribution to Tundra Women’s Coalition.

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Energy Secretary Chris Wright has repeatedly denied that politics were involved in the termination of more than 280 grants last October. A court filing made public in July, however, shows that Energy Department lawyers admitted that the only reason why those awards and not others were canceled is that the grant recipients were in states that vote for Democrats.

Wright and the department have maintained that political considerations did not factor into the original selection of grants for termination, which included awards in both blue and red states for clean energy or energy efficiency projects. But in terms of which grants were ultimately cut, whether they were located in a state that voted for President Donald Trump mattered.

According to a court document, after reviewing about 2,300 grants, DOE designated 624 for termination and sent the list to the Office of Management and Budget in September. All but one of the 284 grants that then received termination notifications from DOE in October were located in states that both voted for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and have two Democratic-caucusing senators. (The one exception was in Canada.) The remaining 340 grants — which were all in states that had voted for Trump and have at least one Republican senator — did not get such notices, and haven’t been terminated as of mid-May. 

DOE agreed in the filing that “the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” and not “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

In an October CNN interview, Wright denied punishing blue states, saying that more terminations in both red and blue states would come and that the department’s decisions were “all based on facts.” 

When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked why awards for hydrogen hubs in the Pacific Northwest were canceled while those for hubs in Republican-controlled states were not, he replied, “The decisions on the others haven’t been announced yet.”

In testimony before Congress in April, Wright said that all of the more than 2,000 projects DOE evaluated “were not evaluated in any way, shape or form based on where they were.” He later made a distinction between the evaluation of the projects – which he said had been done on their merits, and did not involve politics – and the cancellation announcements, which he called “a timing question.”

“We did not involve politics in the decisions,” Wright also said in testimony in June. When Democratic Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island asked directly about the “outcomes,” Wright again distinguished between a “choice of the announcements,” which he said was not made by his department, and the decisions to terminate.

“No decisions were made on politics,” he said. “I keep hearing that charge. It’s bullshit. We’re going to say it a million times. It’s not true.”

When asked whether he thought grant decisions should be based on how a state votes in an election, Wright replied, “They shouldn’t and they weren’t.”

Following the release of the court document on July 15, which was a set of stipulations agreed to that avoided discovery, or the process of fact-finding prior to a trial, Amo and fellow Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California referred Wright to the Department of Justice for allegedly lying to Congress. In an Aug. 4 letter, they called his June testimony “unambiguously false and misleading.”

A DOE spokesperson told us that Wright’s “statements in his testimony are correct. None of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.”

Experts told us that the referral is unlikely to go anywhere, and that Wright had a plausible defense against lying to Congress – but that it seemed clear that the government had allowed politics to determine grant cancellations.

“It is really splitting hairs,” Romany M. Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, told us of Wright’s argument that he was referring to the original evaluations. “The fact is that they are admitting here that the final set of grants that were terminated, the sole factor that decided they would be terminated was the fact that they were going to blue states.”

Grant Cancellations

DOE first announced the grant cancellations in a press release on Oct 1. “DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the release said, saying the cancellations would save about $7.6 billion.

Earlier that day, OMB Director Russell Vought previewed the terminations, posting on X, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” He then said the projects were in a list of 16 states, all of which had voted for Harris in the 2024 election.

This first raised speculation that the grants, which had already been awarded with funds appropriated on a bipartisan basis by Congress, had been terminated based on politics. In particular, several projects, which were comparable, but just in different states, were treated differentially.

Several of the canceled grantees sued the government, and in two court cases, a federal judge restored the funding or determined the cancellations were unlawful. In both cases, the DOE agreed that a “primary” reason for selecting those grants for notification of cancellation and not others was whether the grantee was in a blue state.

Then, in May, as part of another case involving the University of California, the DOE agreed that the inclusion of 284 grants in the October notification was “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” It also agreed to statements explaining that the DOE had first identified 624 grants for cancellation in blue and red states; that OMB had “identified … for inclusion” the grants for the October termination notice, none of which were in red states; and that “DOE subsequently announced it had terminated those grants.” The stipulation became public on July 15. 

It’s true that the court admission only refers to what the document refers to as the “October tranche,” and not the decisions themselves. But it does not appear that the distinction is meaningful. 

“The difficulty is that ultimately only the Department of Energy can actually terminate these things. The Office of Management Budget doesn’t have the statutory authority to terminate them. Only the Department of Energy does,” William Funk, an emeritus professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School who previously served as an assistant general counsel at the DOE, told us.

The DOE may not have been politically biased in their evaluation, and the idea to only cancel the blue state grants may have come from OMB, he said, but “nevertheless they were implementing a political decision.”

“The actual doing of that decision – the actual execution of that decision – was done by DOE,” Funk said.

Moreover, after more than nine months, the other red state grants originally selected for termination do not appear to have been terminated, undermining the DOE defense that it was just a timing issue.

We asked the DOE whether any red state grants had been canceled or were scheduled to be cancelled. The agency did not directly answer the question.

In a statement, a spokesperson said that after some Senate confirmations in October, “a number of new DOE senior leaders undertook a fresh review” of the grants, and that “final action” had now been taken. It is unclear if any red state grants were canceled. As of mid-May, the government agreed in the stipulation document there had been none.

The agency again iterated that “none of the underlying program office determinations to terminate an award was based on an award recipient’s location … or any other political considerations.” 

Given that the referral for potentially lying to Congress goes to Todd Blanche, the now-confirmed attorney general for the Trump administration, Funk said he “absolutely” does not think the DOJ would proceed with prosecution.

But the information in the stipulations may well go on to affect the litigation over the grant terminations, Webb said. 

“These admissions are really remarkable and show a level of activity that is, you know, so blatantly inconsistent with the law that it’s hard to imagine” the plaintiffs not succeeding, she said.

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In a recent interview, President Donald Trump falsely claimed to be the “lowest of the last 10 presidents on inflation,” seemingly based on a chart Trump posted to social media that misleadingly compares price growth over the first 18 months of his second term with total inflation at the end of his predecessors’ full four-year terms. 

For that comparison to hold, of course, you have to assume inflation will be 0% for the next two and a half years — a highly implausible scenario. 

A more telling comparison is to look at where inflation stood 18 months into each of the last 10 presidential terms. By that metric, Trump doesn’t have the lowest inflation at this point in his term, but rather the fourth highest. 

Trump posted the video infographic — which appears to come from an Instagram creator of “viral money charts” — on his Truth Social account Aug. 9. Titled “Inflation by Presidency” and scored to dramatic music, it purports to show cumulative inflation for each of the last 10 presidential terms (not presidents) at months one through 48. The rankings change each month as total inflation grows.

After 18 months, however, the “Trump II” inflation total stops growing — because the rest of his presidency hasn’t happened yet — while the others continue to climb. As a result, Trump’s second term drops through the rankings and is shown as having the lowest cumulative inflation after 48 months. 

Trump bragged about this deceptive statistic in an interview with conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root, which was posted online Aug. 11.

“Did you see the charts that came in yesterday?” Trump said. “I’m the lowest of the last 10 presidents on inflation. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s a chart.” 

In fact, federal economic data show cumulative inflation at this point in Trump’s second term is higher than it was at the same point in most of his recent predecessors’ terms. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, prices grew 4.34% between January 2025 and July 2026. Going back to the late 1980s, only three presidents presided over higher inflation in their first 18 months — Joe Biden with 12.27%, George H.W. Bush with 7.67% and second-term George W. Bush with 5.90%. 

The rest — both Clinton and Obama terms, George W. Bush’s first term and Trump’s first term — were all between 2.38% (Clinton’s second term) and 3.92% (Clinton’s first term) a year and a half after inauguration. 

The creator of the graphic, an Instragram creator with the handle @yunggeeski_, told us in a message that their aim was to show the “full trajectories” of previous administrations, and the software they use would have made it hard to remove Trump’s second term from the data after month 18.

“The chart itself wasn’t intended to claim that Trump will have the lowest inflation over an entire term, since obviously the remainder of the term hasn’t happened yet,” they said.

Asked for comment, White House spokesman Kush Desai did not directly address the president’s use of the misleading statistic, but touted what he said were the administration’s successes in fighting inflation.

“President Trump inherited the worst inflation crisis in a generation, and has implemented policies that have brought prices of key essentials ranging from prescription drugs to eggs to auto insurance down in historic ways, with even more relief to come,” Desai said in a statement. (While prices of those three items have indeed come down in the past year, the overall inflation rate is higher than when Trump took office.)

“Given the President cannot definitely predict inflation rates in the future, only an idiot would take issue with him touting the results of his agenda so far,” Desai added.

But “so far” Trump isn’t the “lowest of the last 10 presidents on inflation,” as he claimed.

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Sen. Susan Collins was one of three Republican senators who voted against passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, and she cited the legislation’s many changes to Medicaid as the main reason. But an ad from a Democratic outside group falsely claims she “voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history.”

Democrats have criticized Collins, who is running for reelection in Maine, for her earlier procedural vote on a motion to advance the OBBBA to the Senate floor for consideration. But the ad ignores the fact that she ultimately voted against the bill instead of supporting it.

The nearly 30-second ad is sponsored by a group called Affordable Maine, which, as of Aug. 12, had spent more than $473,000 to air the TV and digital ad, according to AdImpact.

Collins is facing Democrat Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president, in the toss-up race.

The ad features an intensive care unit nurse who says she has “seen patients being bankrupted by the cost of care.” She then says, “This didn’t just happen. Susan Collins voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history.” At the end, the nurse says, “Healthcare is getting even more expensive. People are losing coverage, labor and delivery centers are closing, hospitals are closing. We need to tell Susan Collins to stop siding with Donald Trump. We can’t afford it.”

We reached out to Affordable Maine about its ad, but we have not yet received a response.

The ad only cites a May 21, 2025, post from Partners in Health that said the OBBBA included the “Largest Medicaid Cut in U.S. History.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office later estimated that the law — which makes several changes to the Medicaid program, including eligibility requirements — will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade. The Medicaid provisions in the law will increase the number of uninsured people by 7.5 million, CBO also estimated.

But, as we said, Collins didn’t “support” the legislation, as the ad claims.

On July 1, 2025, when the Senate voted on whether to pass the bill, Collins joined the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus and Republican Sens. Thom Tillis and Rand Paul in voting against the OBBBA.

In a statement issued that day, Collins said while she “strongly” supported the legislation’s extension of tax relief for families and small businesses, her vote opposing it was “primarily” because of the impact the legislation would have on Medicaid.

“The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families. Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program,” her statement said. “Certainly, there are improvements that should be made to the Medicaid system. For example, I support work requirements for able-bodied adults who are not raising young children, who are not caregivers, or attending school. However, a dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.”

“While I continue to support the tax relief I voted for in 2017, I could not support these Medicaid changes and other issues,” which included the elimination of certain energy-saving incentives and tax credits for businesses and individuals, she said.

In the end, the reconciliation bill — which only required majority support to advance — passed when Vice President JD Vance, as president of the Senate, cast the “yea” vote that broke the 50-50 tie. Then, after the House of Representatives passed the amended Senate version of the bill, President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4.

Collins’ Procedural Vote

On June 28, a few days before that vote, Collins did join 50 other Republican senators in voting to proceed with debate on the OBBBA. That debate ended with the vote on passage.

Collins later told Maine Public that she voted in favor of the motion to move forward on consideration of the bill because “the majority leader, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, always has the right to determine which bills come to the floor, except under very few circumstances.” And she had also told reporters that her vote on passage would “depend on whether the bill is substantially changed.”

The Maine Democratic Party has criticized Collins for her procedural vote, which it called “a decisive vote to greenlight Medicaid cuts.” But while Collins could have voted not to advance the bill, that likely would not have stopped the OBBBA in its tracks.

Without Collins, the vote on the motion would have been 50-50. The vice president was present and prepared to make the tie-breaking vote to move the bill forward anyway.

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During the signing of an executive order on vaccines, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a deluge of false and misleading claims about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule.

The executive order establishes “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations” and directs federal agencies and states to advance them. The new recommendations attempt to repeat prior administration changes to the routine vaccine schedule through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reducing it from targeting 17 to 11 diseases. At the time, we explained that HHS had justified this decision with a variety of incorrect or misleading assertions. A judge subsequently blocked these changes after the American Academy of Pediatrics sued HHS.

During the Aug. 10 signing, Trump repeated claims about the childhood vaccine schedule and autism that he has made in the past, often bolstered by comments from Kennedy.

• Trump misleadingly claimed that the changes to the vaccine schedule align the U.S. with peer nations. When counting diseases the schedule protects against, the changes would put the U.S. at the low end of peer nations in the size of its vaccine schedule, exceeding only Denmark.
• The president falsely claimed that the U.S. requires “72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.” States require certain vaccinations to attend school, but none come close to mandating 72 doses. And there are no federal vaccine mandates.
• Trump said children don’t need to be vaccinated against hepatitis B until adolescence. That ignores what medical experts say are good reasons to vaccinate every newborn at birth.
• He falsely claimed that children and infants are being injected with massive volumes of fluid during routine immunizations, referring at one point to “vats of vaccine.” Doses of childhood vaccines are generally about a tenth of a teaspoon, and there’s no evidence that the size or number of doses under the current vaccination schedule is harmful.
• Trump baselessly suggested rising rates of autism are connected to the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule over time. A number of studies have found no connection between vaccines and autism, and the contention that there has been a massive rise in autism is also faulty.

It’s unclear what the practical results of the executive order will be. “It should not be valid legally, and CDC should not be changing its immunization schedule table,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, wrote in a Substack post.

The new order additionally recommends splitting up combination vaccines into separate doses given on separate medical visits. In another article, we wrote about Trump’s false claims about the combination measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.

Misleading Country Comparisons

Trump justified his Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations by misleadingly claiming that the U.S. has been out of step with peer nations in the number of vaccines it recommends.

“For long — and far too long — a long period of time, America has recommended more childhood vaccines than any peer nation and even twice as many doses as some European countries, and even more than that,” he said during the Aug. 10 signing. He later claimed that “this updated recommendation finally aligns the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world.”

The U.S. childhood vaccine schedule historically has recommended a relatively high number of vaccines, routinely protecting against a few more diseases than the median among other high-income nations, according to our previous analysis. Reducing the number of routinely recommended vaccines to 11, as the executive order suggests, would put the U.S. schedule at the low end compared with peer nations’ recommendations.

HHS previously attempted to limit universal recommendations to these same 11 childhood vaccines in January, although this change was subsequently blocked in court. HHS backed the decision to pare down the schedule with a 33-page assessment comparing the U.S. schedule with recommendations in 20 peer nations. Among these countries, only Denmark has a smaller number of universally recommended vaccines than put forward in the proposed 11-vaccine schedule.

HHS at the time justified these changes with a variety of incorrect or misleading claims about the vaccines and the diseases they target. For example, in no longer recommending universal vaccination against rotavirus — diverging from recommendations in 17 of the 20 peer nations — the assessment minimized the significant impact of hospitalizations and the risk of death from this gastrointestinal illness. The assessment also made misleading assertions about the safety of the hepatitis A vaccine and the effectiveness of pediatric flu vaccination, while claiming that the low incidence of meningococcal disease in the U.S. was reason not to vaccinate.

“[L]ow incidence in the context of a vaccination program is what we want,” Dr. David S. Stephens, an expert on bacterial meningitis at Emory University, told us in an email at the time. “Even though polio is very low in the US we still recommend routine vaccination.” 

No Requirement for 72 ‘Jabs’

Trump erroneously claimed that the U.S. is “requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.” States mandate that children get certain vaccines to attend school, but the number of shots needed to meet these requirements is nowhere near 72.

The CDC’s vaccine schedule recommends a broader set of vaccines than the states require for school. The CDC vaccine schedule does not constitute any sort of vaccine requirement, as we’ve written before.

There are various ways one could count the number of recommended injections or oral doses in the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule. It is only possible to reach the 70s if counting annual flu and COVID-19 vaccines through age 18, while also opting to get some available combination vaccines as separate shots. The current schedule, however, does not recommend COVID-19 shots for all children.

No states require flu vaccines for school-age children, nor do any states require COVID-19 vaccination for school.

Kennedy claimed an even higher number of recommended shots, stating that there were “72 jabs before 18, but it actually could be up to 94 jabs.”

But getting above 90 injections and oral doses would require counting each component of each combination vaccine separately. This includes separating out vaccines, such as the MMR vaccine, that are currently only available in combination. Kennedy’s inflated shot number would therefore only be near possible if Trump prevails in getting vaccine companies to break up combination vaccines, as he advocated in the executive order, while continuing to count annual flu and COVID-19 doses.

Dr. Paul Offit, a physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, pointed out the contradiction in criticizing large numbers of injections for children while simultaneously advocating that combination vaccines be separated.

“Here you have this administration constantly talking about how children get too many shots and then they say they want more shots,” he told us.

Infant Hepatitis B Vaccines

Trump also criticized the longstanding practice of vaccinating infants against hepatitis B at birth, saying that vaccination isn’t necessary until adolescence. But that ignores the reasons medical experts have cited for why every newborn should be vaccinated.

Health care providers, Trump said, are “giving the hepatitis B shot to infants and newborns on top of many other vaccinations. The hepatitis B shouldn’t be given until they’re 14 or 15 years old. They were given early.”

Hepatitis B is a viral liver infection that can cause serious long-term complications, including death from cirrhosis and liver cancer. Infants and children face much higher risks than adults of developing a chronic hepatitis B infection if exposed to the virus, making it especially important to prevent infections in kids. Most childhood infections result from mothers passing the virus to newborns during pregnancy or birth, though caregivers and other close contacts can also transmit the virus. 

As we’ve written before, hepatitis B can also spread in adults via sex or injection drug use, and some activists have invoked the disease’s association with those risk factors to question the need for universal vaccination at birth.

The CDC first recommended a universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine in 1991. As explained in a 2025 review by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, the agency did so after narrower approaches — which focused on screening pregnant women and vaccinating the newborns of those who tested positive — proved ineffective at reducing childhood hepatitis B infections. 

Since that time, according to the review, hepatitis B infections in infants and children have fallen by about 99% — from around 16,000 cases a year to fewer than 20.

The CIDRAP review notes several reasons why the previous frameworks based on maternal screening proved insufficient, including gaps in prenatal care and false negatives. Vaccinations at birth can also protect children from catching the virus if someone else in their household is infected. 

Late last year, the CDC dropped its longstanding recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine, saying only those born to mothers who had tested positive for the virus, or had an unknown infection status, needed a vaccine at birth, and other parents could decide “when or if” to vaccinate — which is among the changes blocked in court. As we’ve written previously, that decision came after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and appointed new ones.

Leading medical groups continue to recommend hepatitis B vaccination for all newborns. 

‘Vats of Vaccine’

Trump also claimed, falsely, that children are being injected with massive volumes of fluid when they get their shots, comparing it to “a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body” or “a large glass of something.”

“Vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child’s body,” Trump said, echoing language he’s used before. He added that appointments should be further apart “so the body can handle this massive amount of fluid being pumped in.”

This is false. The volume of vaccines given to children is nowhere near what Trump is describing. Moreover, as we’ve written before, there’s no evidence that the number or size of doses that kids receive under the current vaccination schedule is harmful, or that the shots need to be further spaced out. 

Offit told us that doses of MMR and other vaccines given to young children are typically around 0.5 milliliters, or a tenth of a teaspoon. So even if a kid gets several vaccines at one appointment, the volume probably wouldn’t exceed one teaspoon. 

Multiple studies have looked at the effects of giving different combinations of vaccines at once and found it to be safe, according to a CDC page dated December 2024. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, kids’ immune systems are responding to thousands of bacteria from the moment of their birth, and the vaccines they receive before age 2 “are just a drop in the ocean when compared with the tens of thousands of challenges their immune systems successfully manage every day.”

Delaying routine vaccinations, meanwhile, can leave children vulnerable to preventable diseases, according to the CDC.

Offit also noted that even though children today receive more vaccines than previous generations, those vaccines actually contain a smaller total quantity of immunologic components — components such as proteins that stimulate an immune response — thanks to advances in vaccine science.

“I had a greater challenge to my immune system with the vaccines — two vaccines — I got as a child than my four grandchildren are getting today,” he said.

Baseless Connection of Vaccines and Autism

Trump repeated the baseless suggestion that the increasing number of recommended vaccinations is linked to a rise in autism.

“Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today,” he said. “In those times, people were much healthier. And, of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist. So there’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism. And we’re going to bring it back to much closer to where it was.”

Autism is “many, many times what it used to be years ago,” he later said. “And it gets progressively worse. And we add progressively more and more vaccines.”

As we’ve written many times before, scientists have researched the question of whether vaccines cause autism in multiple ways, looking at the MMR vaccine, vaccine ingredients shared across multiple vaccines and the vaccine schedule as a whole. None of these efforts has uncovered a link between vaccines and autism.

Trump’s underlying assumption that there has been a massive rise in autism is also highly flawed.

Experts have previously explained to us that while there may have been some true increase in autism, evidence indicates a large portion of the rise in cases comes from increased recognition of the condition. Factors driving this include broadening definitions of autism, as well as increased screening and awareness of the condition. Researchers have also suggested that the growing availability of services for children with autism contributed to a rise in diagnoses.

Rather than recognizing these factors, Kennedy and Trump made a misleading comparison between an estimate from a 56-year-old study and today’s autism prevalence figures.

“In 1970, the biggest epidemiological study at that time in history was performed,” Kennedy said. “And the university scientists from across this country looked at all the 8-year-olds in Wisconsin, about 900,000 children, and they were looking for autism, and they knew what autism looked like. And they came back with an incident rate of 0.8 per 10,000, so less than 1 in 10,000. The rate according to CDC today in this country is 1 in every 31 children.”

Trump repeated a version of these statistics. “When you hear that number, where it was 1 in 10,000 20 years ago and now it’s 1 in 30 … it’s something — something happened in the meantime. Something happened environmentally or otherwise,” he said.

Dr. Eric Fombonne, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University, previously told us that it was “completely absurd” to compare the autism prevalence estimate from the 1970 Wisconsin study to estimates today. At the time of the Wisconsin study, few people were aware of autism, and the researchers looked at children using different diagnostic criteria than are used today. Fombonne added that even at the time, other studies estimated a higher autism prevalence, and that people claiming a large rise in autism cite the Wisconsin study “because it gives them a very low starting point and accentuates the trend.”

Also, the researchers did not do autism evaluations on all the 8-year-olds in the state. They looked at records of children in certain medical settings, such as health clinics and hospitals.

Kennedy then repeated an incorrect claim that autism must be increasing because it’s not being seen in older adults. “If we were just noticing it more, we would notice it in older groups, but we’re not,” he said. “We’re only noticing it in kids who were born around 1989 or after.”

As we explained in 2023 in response to Kennedy’s claims, there are in fact autistic people across all generations, although the CDC doesn’t systematically monitor autism prevalence in adults. There are various factors that may lead autism in older generations to go unrecognized.

Jessica McDonald contributed reporting.

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In signing an executive order about childhood vaccines, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine was unsafe and that splitting up the combination shot would reduce the number of children with autism. There’s no evidence for those claims, and the vaccine has been well-studied for several decades.

Together with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he also repeated many other falsehoods we’ve fact-checked before about vaccines. We wrote about those in another article.

On Aug. 10, Trump signed the executive order aiming to overhaul childhood vaccination in the U.S. Couched in the language of “gold standard” science, but bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s typical process for recommending vaccines, the order attempts to reinstate earlier efforts by the administration to cut the number of universally recommended vaccines. The earlier changes to the vaccine schedule were blocked in court.

In addition to lowering the number of recommended vaccines and asking states to revise their immunization requirements for schools, the order also called for administering the MMR vaccine in separate shots, preferably giving all vaccines “at separate medical visits.”

“We want it in three separate vaccinations given at separate times,” Trump said of the MMR vaccine in remarks made when signing the order. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal. And separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective.”

“It’s inconvenient, it’s five stops,” he said later, referring to multiple trips to the pediatrician. “But it’s something that I think will have a huge impact on autism.”

“The worst thing that would happen would be nothing happens. We’re not going to lose anything,” Trump said of splitting up the MMR vaccine. “At the same time, we could gain tremendously. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives, millions of lives.”

There is no evidence that splitting up the MMR vaccine, which has been in use for more than 40 years, would be safer, save lives or prevent cases of autism. Since a fraudulent scientific paper first proposed a connection between the vaccine and autism nearly 30 years ago, the MMR has been rigorously investigated for any link to the condition. No credible link has been found.

More broadly, the MMR is among the most well-studied vaccines on the planet, with far more data on its safety and effectiveness than any of the standalone vaccines. More than 800 million doses of the Merck MMR vaccine have been given in more than 75 countries as of 2021, with decades of post-marketing safety surveillance and clinical and population studies.

“To date, there has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots,” a Merck spokesperson told us in a statement. “Use of the individual components of combination vaccines increases the number of injections for the individual and may result in delayed or missed immunizations.”

Merck’s combined MMR vaccine was first approved in the U.S. in 1971, not long after the individual vaccines were introduced in the 1960s. In 1978, the vaccine was updated to include a superior rubella component. The Food and Drug Administration approved a similar MMR vaccine made by GSK in 2022. That vaccine has been licensed in more than 100 countries, including all of Europe, and more than 800 million doses have been distributed, according to a company press release in 2022. GSK did not reply to our request for comment.

While health officials in the administration have frequently pointed to European countries as a model for U.S. vaccination policy, all exclusively use the combined MMR shot. No country in the world gives each of the three components separately as part of the childhood immunization schedule. 

Some countries, mostly lower- and middle-income countries, use a measles and rubella combined shot rather than the MMR largely because it is cheaper, and not due to any safety concerns. Japan is one of the few, if not only, high-income countries to separate out the mumps vaccine. This policy stems from a safety concern with the mumps component that used a mumps strain that was never used in the U.S. (Autism rates did not decline when Japan stopped using the combined MMR vaccine.)

Moreover, as the executive order acknowledges, no U.S. vaccine manufacturer still makes the individual shots. Merck stopped in 2008 due to manufacturing constraints, and declined the following year to resume production.

“Today’s executive order is not based on ‘gold-standard science.’ There is no new evidence to justify significant changes to childhood immunization guidance. Dozens of studies involving millions of people show there is no link between vaccines and autism, and yet federal leaders continue to promote this outdated, disproven idea to scare families,” Dr. Andrew D. Racine, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics , said in a statement. “The only purpose of this announcement is to sow confusion so that more people doubt the importance of vaccines. Delaying or skipping shots is risky, especially as measles continues to spread and children go back to school.”

“This executive order is part of a troubling pattern by the administration to attempt to unilaterally change vaccine guidance, particularly for children, rather than relying on the transparent, scientific review that has guided the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule for decades,” Dr. Jan K. Carney, the president of the American College of Physicians, said in a statement. “If implemented, the changes could increase costs to patients and families, including additional copays while also placing a greater burden on families needing to schedule multiple appointments for a multiple-dose MMR vaccine.”

The executive order does not give a scientific rationale for recommending that the MMR vaccine be broken up. Rather, it simply states that its recommendations “recognize” that the MMR vaccine “should be administered in three separate single-disease shots once such products are domestically available.” It directs Kennedy, through a task force, to “present plans” to Trump within 90 days to offer the single vaccines as options.

“President Trump is one of countless parents who have voiced questions and concerns about the combined MMR vaccine,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told us in an email when asked to explain the reasoning for splitting up the MMR and for evidence that the combination shot is a problem. “The Administration’s push to develop separate vaccinations for all three diseases will give parents more options on timing and frequency for their children, which ultimately will increase vaccination rates for all three diseases.”

Experts, however, fear that adding the option of separate MMR vaccinations will lower vaccination rates.

It remains to be seen how Trump’s executive order will play out.

“There’s not the force of law behind this,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us. “He’s asking states to consider implementing this. I think that it will be ignored because it should be ignored. It’s not a science-based recommendation.”

Autism Claims Come from Fraudulent 1998 Paper

As we’ve explained before, the notion that the MMR vaccine might be safer separated out goes back to a fraudulent research paper by the British physician Dr. Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, Wakefield published a case series of 12 children in the Lancet that proposed the MMR vaccine might cause autism. 

The British journalist Brian Deer reported that in a press conference announcing the results, Wakefield recommended that the government stop using the combination MMR vaccine and switch to individual shots, given a year apart.

“I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines given in combination until this issue has been resolved,” Wakefield said.

But the underlying data had been faked or misrepresented. Five of the 12 children had developmental problems prior to vaccination, and many did not even have an autism diagnosis. Prior to the study, Wakefield had been hired as a consultant by a lawyer who wanted to sue MMR manufacturers, and many of the kids in the study had been recruited by law firms or groups opposed to vaccination. The publication was later retracted. Wakefield, who has since lost his medical license, also did not disclose at the time that he had previously filed a patent on his own measles-only vaccine, which he alleged was “most probably safer.”

Fraud aside, the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine causes autism has now been formally tested repeatedly. In 2012, the Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine, concluded that the evidence “favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism,” finding a “high degree of confidence in the epidemiologic evidence” of no connection and a lack of evidence of any mechanistic link.

Since then, even more studies have continued to support this conclusion. In 2019, a Danish study used population registry data to probe the link again, also looking to see whether there might be a link for higher-risk children. “The study strongly supports that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination,” the study concluded.

Last month, a study looking at the electronic health records of 2.5 million American children also found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism when giving the first dose before the age of 2, as is recommended. The first dose is typically given between 12 and 15 months of age, with a second dose at 4 to 6 years of age.

“This is Groundhog Day 25 years later,” Offit said, of the idea that the MMR vaccine should be broken up.

False Allegation of Lethality

During the Q&A portion of the signing, a reporter asked Trump if there was any evidence for his comment that the MMR combination vaccine is “quite lethal.”

“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way,” Trump said. “And I say, well, let’s say there’s a 5% chance of it.”

“Let’s split it up,” he continued, adding that when the MMR is given separately, “they” say “there is no impact. In fact, they’ve said how safe it seems to be. But I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive.”

Regardless of what Trump might have heard, this is false. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare. And death from MMR vaccination is exceedingly rare.

“There have been no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people,” the Infectious Diseases Society of America website says. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine.”

The concern for immunocompromised children is the measles component of the vaccine, which is a weakened but live virus. For almost everyone, this weakened virus poses no risk of death, in contrast to the virus that can circulate in an outbreak and sicken people. But on very rare occasions, if a child is severely immunocompromised, and doctors don’t realize it — or mistakenly still vaccinate against recommendations — it can prove fatal. A 2015 article by the CDC noted that there have been “at least six case reports of death among severely immunocompromised persons that have been linked to vaccine strain measles virus infection.” This exceptionally rare outcome, however, would still occur if children got a separate measles shot rather than the combination vaccine.

Anaphylaxis, a serious allergic reaction that can be life-threatening, can also occur with any vaccine, but these are extremely rare, and in many cases can be treated.

To be clear, a 5% chance of death would be astronomically high and easily detectable in both studies and surveillance. Trump’s claim that the combination MMR vaccine is “quite lethal” is false.

Negative Impacts from Splitting the Vaccine

Many experts disagree with Trump that the worst outcome of splitting up the MMR vaccine would be “nothing.” On the contrary, the main concern, assuming the shots were available, is that fewer people would get vaccinated, putting more people at risk for disease and leading to more outbreaks.

“We’re in the midst of a big measles epidemic. There are more cases of measles than we’ve seen in more than 30 years,” Offit said. Moving to a six-dose regimen, he said, would introduce chaos and confusion, and children would be less likely to get all their necessary vaccines. He called it “an incredibly irresponsible thing to do.”

University of Utah pharmacotherapy professor Joey Mattingly wrote in a Health Affairs perspective last month about using single-disease shots: “The available evidence on vaccination behavior and coverage favors retaining the combined formulation, and the same evidence suggests that moving to separate vaccines, whatever flexibility it might offer families, could make it harder to recover the coverage levels that population immunity requires,” referring to the decline in measles vaccination rates.

Offit said that first, the FDA would need to license the standalone vaccines. It remains to be seen whether any manufacturers would want to go through the process.

The Health Affairs article noted that doing so would require significant investment and clinical trials. “There is little commercial incentive to build a less convenient product to compete with a vaccine that already works,” Mattingly wrote. Clinics and pharmacies would then need to stock them, when it might not make financial sense to do so.

Moreover, just the suggestion that the MMR should be split — as Trump and other officials have now done — could discourage vaccination with the only available vaccine.

As Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, wrote in STAT, “the government is directing the health system toward an alternative that is not licensed here — and asking parents to reconsider a familiar, highly effective combination vaccine in the process.”

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Republican Mike Rogers has provided no evidence that Democrat Abdul El-Sayed “believes that America deserved 9/11,” as Rogers falsely claimed in a statement this month. Instead Rogers’ Senate campaign has pointed to past comments made by a liberal political commentator. El-Sayed said in April that the 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S. was not justified.

Rogers released the statement attacking El-Sayed, who is Muslim, after El-Sayed won the Aug. 4 Democratic primary in the race for Michigan’s open Senate seat. El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official, will now face Rogers, the Republican nominee and a former congressman, in the general election.

Among other claims, the Aug. 5 statement released by Rogers, an Army veteran who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”

The Rogers campaign has not responded to our request for supporting evidence. But the campaign told PolitiFact that the 9/11 claim was based on a video of El-Sayed declining to disavow comments made by Hasan Piker – a popular Twitch streamer who has campaigned with El-Sayed.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee also referenced Piker’s comments in a recent digital ad attacking El-Sayed that says, “When his ally claimed America deserved 9/11, El-Sayed refused to disavow him.”

During an Aug. 21, 2019, livestream in which he responded to Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw saying in a Joe Rogan interview that American involvement in the Middle East was not the reason for the 9/11 attacks, Piker said, “This is so insane. America deserved 9/11, dude.”

For those comments — which he later took back — Piker was suspended for one week from the Twitch streaming platform. 

That same month, in an interview with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks,” Piker said, “No, obviously not,” when asked if he meant that America deserved to be attacked. 

He said, “While that is a very viral quote that is going around currently, if those people were at least even remotely charitable or cared about the actual truth of what I was talking about, they would understand that within context I was simply referencing the fact that all of the foreign policy decisions and our arming of the insurgent groups in the region, and our efforts in destabilizing the Middle East have a direct consequence, a boomerang effect rather if you will, in causing 9/11.”  

Piker added that he advocates against and abhors violence, and that he had been frustrated by Crenshaw’s comments in the Rogan interview. “I know that I was inappropriate,” he said, referring to his 9/11 remarks.

When El-Sayed and Piker appeared together at an event for El-Sayed’s Senate campaign on April 7, a reporter asked El-Sayed if there are “any views that Hasan holds that you disavow.” 

El-Sayed said in response, “I’m not here to disavow people’s views. I’m here to have a conversation about how to get money out of politics, put money back in pockets, and pass Medicare for all. That’s the conversation that folks are here to listen to.”

He continued, “This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture, I thought we were over it.”

The NRSC ad suggests that El-Sayed was addressing Piker’s 9/11 comment. He wasn’t asked specifically in that instance about that remark.

However, El-Sayed did disavow Piker’s comment when previously asked about it.

Before appearing at the campaign event with Piker, El-Sayed did a “Fox & Friends” interview earlier the same day and distanced himself from Piker’s controversial remarks. (Jump to the 3:50 mark in the video.)

“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said. “Because you appear with somebody, doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”

The Democratic candidate again addressed Piker’s comments when asked in an Aug. 9 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if he disavowed them.

“Of course. Of course, it was a dumb statement,” El-Sayed said. “I think Hasan, himself, would say that was a dumb statement. He disavowed it. So, yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11.”

Update, Aug. 11: After we published our story, the Rogers campaign responded. It said El-Sayed refused to disavow Piker’s comments at the April 7 campaign event, and that El-Sayed refused to renounce Piker when asked about campaigning with him in an Aug. 5 CNN interview.

In that CNN interview, anchor Kaitlan Collins asked El-Sayed if he would renounce Piker as Sen. John Fetterman suggested he should do to gain Fetterman’s support. El-Sayed said, “I’m less focused on folks who are campaigning with me, more focused on the folks I’m campaigning to.”

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Q: Is President Donald Trump really cutting Medicare subsidies?

A: The Trump administration recently announced that it is ending a temporary subsidy that has reduced premiums for Medicare Part D standalone prescription drug plans. The subsidy, originally slated to run through at least 2027, was put into place by the Biden administration to offset expected premium increases after major changes to the Part D benefit. Analysts say some Medicare beneficiaries could see higher Part D premiums as a result. 

FULL ANSWER

We’ve received several questions from readers about whether the Trump administration is cutting or changing the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. The administration is not changing the benefit itself, but recently announced that it will end a temporary subsidy that had helped keep premiums for standalone Part D prescription drug plans down. 

The change could lead to higher prescription-drug premiums for some Medicare recipients, though we won’t know the full impact until we get more detailed information about 2027 premiums this fall. 

To understand what’s going on, it’s helpful to have some background on the different parts of Medicare and how the subsidy came about in the first place. 

Broadly, Medicare coverage has three components: Part A covers inpatient hospital care; Part B covers outpatient medical services, and Part D is prescription drug coverage. Beneficiaries can access that coverage in one of two ways. They can enroll in what’s called traditional or original Medicare, which includes Parts A and B, and add a separate, standalone Part D prescription drug plan. Or they can sign up for what are called Medicare Advantage plans — subsidized plans offered by private insurers that bundle hospital, outpatient and, typically, prescription drug coverage together. 

According to the nonpartisan health policy research organization KFF, more than 56 million people were enrolled in Part D coverage as of February — 44% in standalone prescription drug plans and 56% through Medicare Advantage plans. 

The end of the temporary subsidy should not affect premiums for Medicare Advantage enrollees, as it was targeted specifically to the standalone prescription drug plans available to people with traditional Medicare.

Those standalone drug plans are offered by private insurers that contract with the government. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included a major overhaul of the Part D benefit, with several changes meant to make prescription drugs more affordable for seniors with standalone Part D plans. Among those changes was capping enrollees’ total out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs for the first time, starting in 2025. The cap was $2,000 for that year.

Those changes, however, were expected to lead to higher premiums, as insurers adjusted to higher costs on their end. 

One way policymakers tried to mitigate that was by limiting annual increases in something called the “base beneficiary premium,” which is used in calculating the premiums that people actually pay. The Inflation Reduction Act caps year-to-year base premium increases at 6% per year through 2029; that provision remains unchanged.

Separately, the Biden administration in 2024 created the temporary subsidy program, which was meant to further stabilize standalone drug-plan premiums starting in 2025 (hence its official name, the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration). The Trump administration renewed the subsidy at a lower level for 2026, then announced last month that it would no longer be in place for 2027.

The subsidy cost $9.8 billion over two years, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, said the premium demonstration program appears to have worked as intended. In 2026, the subsidy reduced premiums for standalone Part D plans by an estimated $16 per month on average, according to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

“To put that in context, the average standalone drug plan premium this year is $36 a month,” she said. “So without that additional subsidy, people might have had to pay nearly 50% more for drug coverage this year.”

By extension, some Medicare beneficiaries could see higher increases in their Part D premiums for 2027 now that the subsidy is ending, she said. But we won’t have a clear picture of how costs are changing until September, when the federal government releases information about premiums for specific plans.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for Medicare, has said most people will not see a large spike in premiums. 

“The Biden admin gave BILLIONS of taxpayer money DIRECTLY to Big Insurance Companies,” Oz wrote in a July 28 post on X, referring to the subsidy. “This is unacceptable. We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed. Premiums will go up by less than $10 [per month] for most Medicare recipients, with many even seeing LOWER premiums.”

We asked CMS what those figures were based on. In response, a spokesperson said bids submitted by insurers for 2027 plans show the subsidy demonstration is no longer needed because the market has adjusted.

“We understand that outside organizations without plan bid information have voiced concerns, however our data shows that plan bids have stabilized,” the spokesperson told us in an email. “[A]mong the roughly quarter of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in plans the previous demo impacted, over 85% of beneficiaries will have access to a Part D plan that is either lower cost or less than a $10 increase next year.”

The spokesperson also said all of those beneficiaries “will have access to at least three prescription drug plan options with total monthly premiums of $50 or less.”

The spokesperson did not respond to our followup question about whether 85% of those beneficiaries could stay in their current plans without premiums rising more than $10, or if some would have to switch plans to keep costs below that level. 

Again, we’ll get clearer data on this in September. 

“It may well be true that plans have gained sufficient experience in managing drug costs under the revamped Part D benefit design,” Cubanski said. “But I think it’s also true that without this enhanced financial support, there are going to be some Medicare beneficiaries who will face deeper premium increases.”

She encouraged people with standalone Part D coverage to look at their plans carefully during this fall’s open enrollment period; in addition to changes in premiums, it’s possible that insurers could pare back which drugs they cover, increase cost-sharing or make other plan changes to keep their costs down.

If premiums do rise significantly, that could also have other effects on the market for standalone prescription drug plans. 

Cubanski said the temporary subsidy was designed to not just stabilize premiums, but also to stabilize enrollment. She noted that standalone Part D plans already face “stronger financial headwinds” compared with Medicare Advantage drug plans, which are more heavily subsidized. If more people switch to Medicare Advantage, that could push up overall Medicare spending over time. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates the federal government is paying 14% more for Medicare Advantage enrollees compared to what they would have cost under traditional Medicare, a difference of $76 billion in 2026.

Standalone Part D plans are also important in many rural areas, where people have fewer Medicare Advantage options, Cubanski said.

“People still have about 10 prescription drug plans on average to choose from in 2026, so it’s not like this market [for standalone prescription drug plans] is on the verge of collapse,” Cubanski said. “But we have seen some, I think, concerning signs about the health of this marketplace relative to drug coverage through Medicare Advantage plans.” 

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Every election cycle since 2010, we have published profiles of some of the many outside groups trying to influence who gets elected to Congress and the White House. Today, we’re launching our latest Players Guide with write-ups of eight of the biggest spenders so far for the 2026 midterms.

Each profile has information about the individuals who run the group, the people funding the group, the group’s political leanings and motivations, and how the group is spending the millions it has raised. If the group has been around for a while, we note its spending during the prior election cycle for comparison.

During the last midterm cycle, outside groups collectively spent $2 billion on independent expenditures, which are advertisements and other communications that expressly advocate for or against candidates for office, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. The total was double that amount for the 2024 presidential cycle.

The eight groups we’re starting with this time include the Senate Majority PAC, which is trying to help Democrats retake control of the Senate, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is working to keep Republicans running the House of Representatives. We also highlighted Fairshake, a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC that backs or opposes candidates based on whether they appear to be for or against policies favorable to the digital currency industry.

Come back throughout the general election for details about other key players, as we’ll be publishing more profiles over the next three months. Some of the featured groups will be ones we’ve written about before — because they continue to spend large amounts of money — but we’ll be writing about a few of the newly formed groups as well.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

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