President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

During a signing event at the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump falsely claimed that pediatricians “have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda,” that is “poured into a little child’s body, and bad things happen in too many cases. This is an explosion; this is an epidemic,” Trump said.

He also tied the new vaccine recommendations to his goal of finding out “what’s going on with autism.” Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data on millions of children have found no evidence linking the neurodevelopmental condition to immunizations. Nevertheless, Trump suggested that the changes outlined in the order would reduce autism rates in the US.

“There’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism,” Trump said. “It is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world. So we’re reducing them.”

“Fantastic job”

Under the new recommendations, Trump said children should get fewer vaccines, suggesting that the US recommends an excessive number of vaccines compared with other high-income countries. In reality, by dropping down to only 11 recommended vaccinations, the US becomes an outlier in recommending so few, according to fact-checking by Stat News in January. The only other country that recommends so few vaccines is Denmark, a small, relatively homogenous country with universal healthcare.