President Donald Trump and his dangerous health secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr. struck another blow against public health by issuing an executive order intending to space out childhood vaccinations and to separate out the common measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, replicating a push at the CDC that had been blocked by a federal judge.

RFK Jr. should be impeached and removed by Congress for his assault against the American people.

Children will be sickened, and possibly die, because of this, which runs counter to decades of established safe and effective medical practices. But it plays into the paranoid vein that vaccines cause autism, a pernicious falsehood that Trump and RFK Jr. have ridden for years.

Despite the clear dangers here, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the president cannot in fact rule by decree, much as he’d like to. The order calls for the spacing out of vaccinations and the end of certain vaccine mandates, but the federal government has no ability to unilaterally impose these requirements on health providers.

It unfortunately does have levers to try to shift what insurance is required to cover, for example, but if insurers opt to continue to cover the medically safe combined MMR vaccine and follow the existing schedule, and if medical providers opt to continue to offer it, it will continue to be available, regardless of RFK’s protestations. Even just having vaccines spaced out is additional friction that will inevitably lead to fewer children receiving their inoculations.

Ominously, the order pledges federal pressure, including from the Justice Department, to push states into overturning their own vaccine mandates. The states must resist, regardless of the political affiliation and ideology of their leaders; the pathogens that can and will kill their children do not, after all, observe these political distinctions.

Really, everyone’s health is at stake, because while children are at the forefront of risk, as we all unfortunately saw firsthand during the COVID pandemic, pathogens evolve the more they pass through a population. That means protections for those who have been vaccinated will weaken and wane as the disease afflicts those who haven’t, threatening public health as a whole.

Measles in particular is both monstrously contagious, almost guaranteed to infect anyone without existing immunity who comes into contact with someone who’s afflicted with it, and can trigger immunity amnesia that leaves a sufferer more susceptible to other diseases they were already immune to.

These risks are all being taken in service to preventing a consequence that is not real. Over and over again, research resources have been wasted on proving again and again that vaccines — arguably the greatest human achievement, having saved lives on the order of hundreds of millions — do not cause autism, do not have widespread deleterious effects and are not just safe to use but imperative for public safety.

Unfortunately, there is no level of evidence that will satisfy RFK and his anti-vax cadre, because theirs is not an argument rooted in rigor or scientific process. A single discredited article from decades ago and oceans of “just asking questions” conspiracism that has been definitively disproven at every turn are enough for them, because theirs is closer to an article of faith than it is a rational evaluation.

That’s not going to change; what has changed is that they now have the ability to try to impose their own anti-science beliefs from the top down. Every day that they have this power, they will attempt to use it, which means that they must be stopped from doing so. This is Congress’ obligation. This is what the impeachment process was designed for, to remove public officials abdicating their responsibilities. Use it.

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