Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s public health agencies, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
The survey of 1,650 adults, conducted last month, found that on matters of health, a majority of Americans say they have far more confidence in their own doctors, pediatricians and career scientists at federal agencies than the political appointees charged with overseeing those scientists.
It comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has defended some of his more controversial decisions by arguing that they are necessary to restore trust in public health.
After he fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez after just a month on the job, he wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the agency had “squandered public trust” and that it was his mission to restore it. And when he fired all of the members of an influential vaccine advisory committee last summer, he said that the Department of Health and Human Services was “prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda.”
However, trust in public health agencies has fallen in Trump’s second term, according to the survey. Confidence in the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health hovered around 75% during the Biden administration. Since Trump’s second term began, trust in the agencies has dropped to just over 60%.
But 67% of adults said they have confidence in career scientists at agencies such as the CDC, NIH and FDA to provide trustworthy information about public health.
“The public is differentiating the trustworthiness of career scientists in the CDC, NIH, and FDA from that of the leaders of those agencies,” Ken Winneg, managing director of survey research, said in a press statement.
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Less than half of the respondents said they have trust in some of the country’s top public health officials, including Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Thirty-eight percent of Americans said they trust Kennedy to provide reliable information about public health, while 42% said the same about Oz.
Those numbers fall short of the 54% of Americans who said they trusted Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci was a central, but also divisive, figure during the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic, serving under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement that trust in public health has been declining since the pandemic, citing a study that looked at trust in doctors and hospitals.
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“Secretary Kennedy was brought in to restore credibility through transparency, gold standard science, and accountability,” Nixon said. “HHS is focused on rebuilding public confidence by ensuring that decisions are driven by rigorous evidence.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration made unprecedented changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, removing shots to protect against the flu, RSV and hepatitis B and others from the list of recommended vaccines.
More than three-quarters of the respondents, 77%, said they trust the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a group that strongly opposed the vaccine schedule changes.
Over the past year, the AAP has taken an increasingly outspoken role in defending childhood vaccines — pushing back with its own set of recommendations as federal guidance on the shots shifted toward “shared clinical decision making.” In December, advisers to the CDC handpicked by Kennedy voted to reverse a long-standing recommendation that all newborns get a first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth.
The new survey shows that more Americans would side with AAP than the CDC over vaccine disagreements. Forty-two percent of people surveyed would be likely to accept a recommendation from the AAP on hepatitis B vaccines, compared with 11% who said they’d trust the CDC on the same matter. The others said they were either unsure or would take neither group’s recommendation.
In addition to the AAP, large professional medical organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association are trusted more than federal agencies when it comes to public health information.
More than 8 in 10 Americans (82%) said they trust the American Heart Association, while 73% said they trust the American Medical Association. And 86% said they trust their own doctors and nurses to give them reliable information about public health.
“The most exciting news here is that there is wide trust in one’s own doctor,” said Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “This speaks to the importance of asking doctors to help interpret all of the noise that’s swirling around health in America.”
