President Donald Trump made numerous false claims during a Cabinet meeting Thursday at the White House – many of them about vaccines.
He wrongly asserted that babies are given 82 vaccines in a single shot (not even close to true). He wrongly asserted that babies are given vaccine doses the size of two glasses of water (a standard dose is a small fraction of a teaspoon). He wrongly asserted that Amish people don’t take vaccines or pills (many do) and don’t have any autism (they do). And he wrongly asserted that the measles vaccine is already given separately from other vaccines (no separate measles shot is available in the US).
Trump was also wildly inaccurate on other subjects.
He again claimed each alleged Venezuelan drug boat kills 25,000 Americans, a number that is plainly absurd. He again used mathematically impossible figures in promising that drug prices will fall by hundreds of percent. He again declared that he had settled seven wars even before the new ceasefire he brokered in Gaza, though his figure includes a war that hasn’t ended and two situations that were not wars during his presidency.
He revived his usual lie that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election he legitimately lost to Joe Biden. And he declared once more that the big domestic policy bill he signed earlier this year includes “no tax on Social Security,” though that’s not what the bill says.
Here is a fact check of these remarks.
Babies and vaccines: Echoing his previous false claim that babies are given shots from “a vat of 80 different vaccines,” Trump lamented this time that “we have 82 vaccines that we give simult(aneously),” cutting himself off before finishing the word, then said, “You give 82 vaccines in a shot to a little baby that hasn’t even formed yet.” Babies are not given 82 vaccines in a single shot or even during a single visit to the doctor. In fact, babies do not receive anywhere close to 82 vaccines in total, as the the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended childhood vaccination schedule shows; US babies generally get well under 20 different vaccines (and roughly 20 to 30 shots) by the age of 15 months.
The size of vaccine doses: Trump, referring to a glass of water on the table in front of him, speculated that autism could possibly be linked to “these massive vaccines that are twice the size of a jar like that, a glass of water like that – into a baby’s body.” The notion of a link between vaccines and autism has been debunked, and no vaccine given to babies is even close to the size of a glass of water, let alone two glasses. The MMR vaccine, to cite a typical example, has a dosage of 0.5 milliliters, roughly a tenth of a teaspoon.
The Amish, vaccines and autism: Trump, referring to the Amish community in Pennsylvania, said “they don’t take any of this stuff and they have virtually none, right, they have no autism.” It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to vaccines specifically or both vaccines and modern medications when he said “don’t take any of this stuff,” but the claim is false regardless; Braxton Mitchell, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has worked with Amish communities for more than 30 years and is co-director of the Amish Research Clinic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said it’s not true that the Amish categorically reject vaccines and pills, and not true that they have no autism at all.
“Regarding vaccines: some Amish choose to vaccinate their kids and some do not. So it is incorrect to say that Amish do not vaccinate,” Mitchell told CNN when Trump made similar claims in late September. “A claim was also made about use of Tylenol. I can tell you that Tylenol is used by many Lancaster Amish.”
Childhood vaccination rates in Amish communities have long been lower than in the country as a whole, but they are not nonexistent. And while Amish people sometimes prefer alternative treatments over modern medications, their communities do not completely shun pills like Tylenol. Mitchell noted it’s not clear what the prevalence of autism is in Amish communities, since there has been “very little systematic data” collected on the subject, but: “Bottom line: yes, autism does exist in the Amish. We do not know how its frequency compares to non-Amish.”
Vaccination for the measles: Trump repeated his call to split the safe and effective measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) combination vaccine into three separate shots, then baselessly said, “The measles is already separate now, and it works out much better.” There is no separate shot for measles available in the United States. The acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did join Trump in calling this week for “vaccine manufacturers to develop safe monovalent vaccines to replace the combined MMR and ‘break up the MMR shot into three total separate shots,’” but the companies have not already done so.
Alleged Venezuelan drug boats: Touting the military attacks he has ordered on at least four alleged Venezuelan drug boats since early September, Trump falsely claimed, “Every single boat that you see getting taken out kills 25,000 Americans, think of that.” This number does not make any sense.
The total number of US overdose deaths from all drugs in 2024 was about 82,000, according to provisional federal data. Trump is essentially claiming, in other words, that his decision to attack a small number of boats in the Caribbean prevented more than a full year’s worth of drug deaths. The president’s figure is “absurd,” said Carl Latkin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of public health with a joint appointment at its medical school. “He’s claiming that he’s solved the overdose mortality crisis” with four boat strikes, and “that does not have any semblance of reality.” You can read a longer fact check here.
Trump and wars: Trump, speaking about his success in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza, falsely claimed this was “number eight” on the list of wars he had “settled.” He added, “We’ve settled seven wars, or major conflicts, but we’ll call them wars.”
Trump’s number is inaccurate even with his “major conflicts” hedge.
Trump has previously explained that his list of seven supposed wars settled includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war; it was a long-running diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River, a dispute that is unresolved. Trump’s list includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. (He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.) And his list includes a supposed success in ending a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration this year – which was never signed by the leading rebel coalition doing the fighting.
Prescription drug prices: Trump repeated his familiar but nonsensical boast that his “Most Favored Nation” policy on prescription drug pricing is going to reduce drug prices by well over 100%; this time, he claimed, “We’re going to be reducing the costs of medicines by 100%, 200, 300, 500% and even more than that.” Those numbers are not mathematically possible, as CNN and others have repeatedly noted.
Even if Trump’s policy does produce a big decline in drug prices – and that is very much uncertain given that it relies on cooperation by reluctant pharmaceutical companies or hypothetical future regulatory action – he can’t actually cut the price of any product by 150% to 500%. If he magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut. You can read a longer fact check here.
The 2020 election: Trump repeated his usual lie that the 2020 election “turned out to be a rigged election” and the “we had the wrong guy get in there” as president. Trump lost a free and fair election to a legitimately elected Joe Biden.
Trump’s big bill and Social Security: Trump repeated his false claim that the “big beautiful” bill he signed into law earlier this year ensures “no tax on Social Security.” It doesn’t.
The legislation did create an additional, temporary $6,000-per-year tax deduction for individuals age 65 and older (with a smaller deduction for individuals earning $75,000 per year or more), but the White House itself has implicitly acknowledged that millions of Social Security recipients age 65 and older will continue to pay taxes on their benefits – and that new deduction, which expires in 2028, doesn’t even apply to the Social Security recipients who are younger than 65.
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