Americans are losing faith in the country’s health agencies. A new KFF poll shows that people’s trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reached a low not seen since the covid-19 pandemic.
The poll offers a glimpse into how Americans are feeling about the country’s public health agencies since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, and since his controversial pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., took the reins at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The poll found that just half of Americans still trust the CDC to provide reliable information about vaccines—far below the level of trust that people have in their own doctors or other health organizations. A majority also said they disapproved of Kennedy’s job performance, and that they disagreed with the Trump administration’s decision to link autism to women taking acetaminophen (Tylenol) during pregnancy despite a lack of evidence.
Declining trust
For the poll, KFF surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 1,300 American adults online and by telephone, and it was conducted a day after Trump and Kennedy held a widely criticized press conference last month claiming that Tylenol use during pregnancy causes autism.
Only 18% of the poll’s respondents expressed a “great deal” of confidence in the CDC’s vaccine information, while a further 32% said they had a “fair amount” of trust. These figures represent a sharp decline in the space of just months: An earlier poll taken in April this year found 59% of people said they trusted the CDC to some extent. Still, faith in the CDC had been waning: In 2023, 63% of people said they trusted the CDC at least somewhat. When considering similar polls evaluating public trust in the CDC as a whole, this is the lowest level of trust in the agency since the start of the covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, according to KFF.
Conversely, a strong majority of people (83%) still trust their personal doctor to give them reliable vaccine information, while roughly two-thirds of people surveyed also trust the American Medical Association (64%) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (69%) to do the same. About 80% of Americans also agreed that public schools should require some vaccines for students, including 75% of Republicans.
The RFK Jr. effect
The new poll jibes with other recent surveys that suggest Kennedy is not popular with most Americans.
About 59% of respondents disapproved of his overall job performance, while 62% disapproved of how he’s handled vaccine policy. Kennedy has a decades-long history of vaccine skepticism, and since his appointment to lead HHS, he has made several moves that have seemed poised to undermine vaccine policy and challenge decades-worth of accepted science—actions that have helped fuel the internal collapse of the CDC.
Earlier this summer, former CDC director Susan Monarez was fired after she allegedly refused to rubber stamp the recommendations made by a panel composed of Kennedy’s picks to inform the CDC’s vaccine policies, many of whom have their own track record of attacking vaccine safety and voicing skepticism. Following her departure, the current acting CDC chief Jim O’Neill—another Kennedy backer—has since called for the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to be broken up, a longtime goal of the anti-vaccination movement.
The KFF poll also found that most Americans (77%) did hear about Trump’s claim that Tylenol use increases the risk of autism. But only a very few said that this claim was “definitely true” (4%), while 30% said it was “probably true.” About 35% said the claim was “definitely false” and another 30% said it was “probably false.” Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, belief in this claim was highly partisan, the poll found, with Republicans more likely to give some credence to the idea. Scientists have not found any concrete evidence of a link between Tylenol and autism, and critics have said that the president and Kennedy’s claims were based on weak and mixed evidence, at best.
There are many reasons why Americans’ trust in the CDC and other health agencies has ebbed and flowed over time, but the polling reflects Kennedy’s rapid ascension and his overhaul of the country’s public health agencies’ approach to vaccines and children’s health.
