[Op-Ed] Vaccine Rollback Is War On Black, Brown Children

White supremacy in this country is so damn evil that it will summon old diseases defeated generations ago just to poison the inheritance of Black and Brown children who represent the end of white America’s presumed ownership of the future.

On Monday, the Trump regime signed an executive order that will begin dismantling federal protections and deliberately weaken the public-health infrastructure that protects children from getting infected and dying from preventable diseases. We must not dismiss the Trump regime’s new rollback on childhood vaccines as just another fresh eruption of stupidity, as “parental choice,” religious conscience, anti-science lunacy, or administrative incompetence. 

What we are witnessing is racial sabotage against America’s now majority-nonwhite childhood population.

Among the vaccines the Trump regime is removing from the recommended universal list are hepatitis B, flu, and COVID-19. Why target these three? 

Because the COVID vaccination is a right-wing symbol of government tyranny. Anti-vaccine activists have questioned why newborns need protection from Hepatitis B, a supposedly “adult” disease associated with sex and drug use, even though it can also pass from mother to infant during birth and spread through infected household members. And the annual flu shot was added to this list because it feeds the narrative that kids already receive too many vaccines. 

Trump’s order also calls for breaking the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) into three separate shots and administering them to children during separate medical visits. Why? Because there’s a long-debunked anti-vaccine fantasy that giving kids multiple vaccines together overwhelms their immune system and causes autism. This lie has now been elevated into federal policy. 

This administration is seeking to replace dependable public-health standards with confusion, individual negotiation, and parental suspicion. Not to mention, what should be just one lifesaving appointment will be turned into cost and time burdens for families.

Already cash-strapped and stressed-out families will face more logistical barriers, transportation costs, and missed work time to ensure their children get fully vaccinated. Affluent parents with insurance coverage, trusted pediatricians, reliable transportation, and flexible jobs will be able to navigate repeated appointments for their children. 

This new schedule will leave children in marginalized communities unprotected longer between shots, and it makes it easier to abandon halfway through. And then, when vaccination rates decline and diseases spread, the administration will blame individual families for the outbreaks it helped create in the first place.

And Trump’s order comes at a moment when we’re witnessing the highest resurgence of measles caseloads in 35 years.

Thirty-five years ago, a measles epidemic tore through poor urban Black and Latino communities across the United States.  Between 1989 and 1991, more than 55,000 Americans were infected with measles, 11,000 filled hospital beds, and 123 people died. Those who were disproportionately affected were unvaccinated Black, Latino, Native, and poor children under 5, who faced as much as 16 times the risk borne by white children.

Let’s be very clear: these devastating outcomes did not occur because families in cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Philadelphia collectively rejected science. There was no mass anti-vaccine movement happening in those communities. Their children ended up in hospitals and morgues because many simply lacked access to regular pediatric care, and because this country had deliberately built a health-care system that placed lifesaving vaccines beyond their reach. 

The federal government documented and studied the racial outcomes from that epidemic and concluded that failure to vaccinate children at the appropriate age was the principal cause of the epidemic. 

After the government’s data showed that Black and brown children under age contracted measles at significantly higher rates than white children, Congress responded in 1993 by authorizing the creation of the Vaccines for Children program, which made vaccine access easier and more universally accessible to vulnerable children.

And guess what? The program worked. 

The CDC later reported that by 2000, continuous domestic transmission of measles had been eliminated in the United States, and by 2005, racial disparities in MMR and polio vaccination coverage had disappeared.

Now, flash forward to 2026.

Today, America’s child population is majority non-white. So it is only logical that an anxious white-supremacist regime would make it harder for families of color to vaccinate their children. We can turn to Project 2025, especially pages 452-255 where the ideological and administrative framework is laid out. 

No, you won’t find lines that explicitly tell the Trump administration to “Be sure to break up the MMR vaccine and get rid of hepatitis B, flu, and COVID-19 vaccines so we can purge children of color who outnumber our own.” 

What Project 2025 did was lay the groundwork for Trump’s rollback by attacking the credibility of scientific experts and weakening federal agencies that protect us from disease, including the CDC and NIH.

This administration has also silenced racial equity concerns in healthcare. We’ve known for decades that Black and Latino children face greater barriers to consistent healthcare. They also know full well that the more appointments a vaccine series requires, the more likely children from struggling families who can’t afford another bus ride or copay, or unpaid time from work, are to drop off. 

Modern white supremacy won’t just come out and admit, “We want to abandon, neglect, or murder your children.” Instead, it will create confusion and build obstacle courses on top of an already unequal landscape. And when children get sick or end up in little coffins, the administration will blame the families for what it engineered.

I always say that this white supremacist administration is kaleidoscopically evil. Every which way you turn, the racist logic gets revealed. And so this is why we must see this new vaccine order as one part of a broader political project of racial sabotage that continues to attack citizenship and voting rights, terrorize immigrant families, whitewash textbooks, defund schools, narrow access to college, and dismantle civil rights protections. 

America’s majority non-white demographic has already arrived, and white nationalists cannot stop these children from becoming America’s future. They cannot all be deported, locked up, or even murdered en masse, but they must be prevented from being protected and inheriting flourishing lives. And so, white nationalists are weakening the systems that educate, feed, immunize, and help them grow into healthy adults because they would rather poison the future than surrender their presumed ownership of this nation.

But the final perversity is that white families will carry little coffins too because infectious diseases don’t discriminate. While the CDC has not published a complete national racial breakdown for the 2026 measles cases, local reporting has uncovered outbreaks in undervaccinated predominantly white communities, including the Mennonites in West Texas, fundamentalist Mormons living along the Utah-Arizona border, and Ukrainian and other Eastern European religious communities in South Carolina. 

The history of this country has repeatedly shown that white supremacy is a death cult that will destroy public goods, reverse medical progress, and sacrifice their own children rather than allow Black and brown folks to have an equal claim to public goods or healthy, thriving lives.

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[Op-Ed] Trump Vaccine Rollback Is Part Of War On Black, Brown Children was originally published on newsone.com