“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough condemned President Trump‘s Monday executive order reducing the number of federally-recommended childhood vaccines, calling it “so stupid” and “so dangerous.”
“That’s just not true. I’ve studied that. That’s absolutely not true,” Scarborough said Tuesday morning, in response to a clip of Trump asserting in the Oval Office that the MMR vaccine needs to be divided into three separate vaccinations in order to be “not at all lethal” and “just very effective.” Co-host Mika Brzezinski echoed Scarborough’s sentiments.
“Physicians and scientists have said the single MMR shot is safe and effective, and breaking it up could leave children vulnerable to dangerous diseases for longer,” Brzezinski noted, adding, “Trump yesterday also repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism, despite scientific consensus and decades of studies that have firmly concluded there is no link.”
“I have a child who is on the spectrum, and this is something I have studied intensively,” Scarborough told “Morning Joe” viewers. “There’s not a single legitimate study that suggests vaccines play any role in the rise of autism. If there were, I would have been telling you about it over the past 20 years.”
“To see that happening in the Oval Office yesterday is what everybody feared would happen when Bobby Kennedy Jr. was put into that position,” Scarborough added of RFK Jr.’s appointment as Health and Human Services secretary.
You can watch the full “Morning Joe” segment yourself in the video below.
Scarborough and Brzezinski continued to hammer the dangerous potential of Trump and RFK Jr.’s ongoing vaccine claims.
“This is so stupid and it’s so dangerous, and it spreads so much disinformation,” Scarborough said. “Because of the lies, because of the conspiracy theories, now there are parents out there that are going to be frozen in place because they heard this coming out of the Oval Office and [they won’t] do what parents have done for generations to protect their children from terrible diseases.”
“High vaccination rates in the United States given on a medically recognized schedule have prevented the spread of potentially deadly diseases,” Brzezinski explained. “A study published in 2024 by the CDC found that, for children born from 1994 to 2023, routine vaccinations prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and more than 1.1 million deaths.”
Scarborough, Brzezinski and co-hosts Willie Geist and Jonathan Lemire all expressed befuddlement over Trump’s repeated reluctance to push back against Kennedy on any of his anti-vaccine rhetoric and policies.
“He’s just letting Bobby Kennedy Jr. run roughshod over him and endangering children in this country,” Geist said, prompting Lemire to add, “This is deeply dangerous.”
