Nearly Half of Parents Say Spacing Childhood Shots Is Healthier

Forty-eight percent of parents told KFF that children are healthier when vaccines are spaced out and not given as multiple shots in one visit. Fifty-two percent said there is no strong evidence for that. The split is partisan: 69 percent of Republican parents favored spacing, while 68 percent of Democratic parents said the evidence does not support it. KFF’s write-up labeled the spacing view mistaken. President Trump’s August executive order calls for giving shots at separate visits where feasible and for limiting routine childhood vaccination to 11 diseases. That order remains blocked in federal court.

Half of adults said they are confident COVID-19 shots are safe for children. Among Democrats the figure is 77 percent. Among independents it is 50 percent. Among Republicans it is 21 percent. Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement were nearly as low, at 28 percent. For pregnancy the overall confidence number is 39 percent, down from 53 percent in May 2022. The drop is 17 points among Democrats and 15 points among Republicans. Britain no longer recommends these shots for expectant mothers.

Physician and epidemiologist Tracy Beth Høeg has pointed to the size of Pfizer’s 2021 pregnancy trial. The company said it would enroll 4,000 women. Høeg reported that 161 vaccinated participants and 159 placebo recipients completed the blinded portion, and that the published results did not include miscarriage. She wrote that limiting the trial let Pfizer say it found no significant signal. KFF’s poll does not test that claim. It records that most adults, including eight in ten women of reproductive age, are uncertain whether vaccination in pregnancy raises miscarriage risk.

Eighty-two percent of adults still say the benefits of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine outweigh its risks. Among parents who support MAHA, 69 percent say the same. Twenty-nine percent of those parents say the risks outweigh the benefits, compared with 16 percent of parents who do not support the movement. Large majorities across party lines express confidence in the polio vaccine. For hepatitis B and flu, more than 80 percent of Democrats are confident, against roughly 60 percent of Republicans.

Earlier KFF surveys found that getting several shots in one visit ranked among parents’ top reasons for skipping or delaying childhood vaccines. The current poll does not measure whether spacing changes disease rates. It measures what parents believe when they are asked. KFF is running its own series on health in the 2026 midterms and highlighted steady confidence in older shots. Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said the pre-midterm timing looked like an effort to prop up the claim that most people still trust vaccines.

Fifty-nine percent of adults said they had heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about the administration’s attempts to rewrite the childhood schedule, including the August order. Among those who had heard, 60 percent expected negative health effects. Thirty-eight percent of all adults said they were not sure what the changes would do.

The numbers that moved are not the old vaccines. They are the COVID shots for children and for pregnancy, and the near-even split among parents on whether a single visit full of injections is the right default. KFF calls one side of that split incorrect. The White House order treats spacing as policy. The poll shows parents already divided on the question the order is trying to settle.