RFK Jr. losing battle to boost trust in public health agencies

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has defended some of his controversial moves as being part of his effort to restore faith in public health agencies.

It doesn’t seem to be working. Polling from the start of this year shows that public trust in government health institutions has continued to decline during Kennedy’s first year in the role. 

Since being confirmed as secretary, Kennedy has pointed to public trust to justify pushing out leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and reducing the childhood immunization schedule earlier this year. 

“President Trump has asked me to restore that trust and return the CDC to its core mission,” Kennedy wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in September titled “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC.” 

“First, the CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun. It won’t stop until America’s public-health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty and integrity,” he wrote. 

Yet new polling released this past week found that over the past year, the public’s trust in federal health agencies including the CDC, Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health has continued to decline, with people being more likely to trust professional medical organizations outside the government. 

The survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania found that public trust in these institutions fell by 5 to 7 percentage points in the past year. A majority of 60 percent to 62 percent of respondents still say they have some confidence in these agencies.  

Only 38 percent of participants said they trusted Kennedy for public health information. 

These findings by Annenberg followed similar results from KFF’s Poll on Health Information and Trust, which found in February that less than half of public participants — 47 percent — said they trust the CDC a “fair amount” to provide reliable vaccine information following the changes to the childhood immunization schedule. This metric has dropped more than 10 percentage points since the start of the second Trump administration.

When reached for a response to the recent polling, Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to The Hill, “Public trust in U.S. public health declined from 72 percent to 40 percent between 2020 and 2024, a trend that began well before this administration,” citing a 2024 survey of U.S. adults’ trust in physicians and hospitals. 

“Secretary Kennedy was brought in to restore credibility through transparency, gold standard science, and accountability. HHS is focused on rebuilding public confidence by ensuring that decisions are driven by rigorous evidence,” Nixon added. 

This trend of declining trust predates both Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“There’s a shift in the ways in which the proportion of the public in which you’re seeing change is gathering information that it trusts about health care,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the APPC, told The Hill. 

According to Jamieson, organizations like the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which both scored better than federal health agencies, are “now increasingly seen as the source of reliable health information on some topics.” 

“That requires extra work on the part of the public, because you’ve got to figure out, who are they, what are they,” Jamieson said. 

Seventy-three percent to 82 percent of respondents in the Annenberg survey said they had confidence in the public health information coming from groups such as the AMA, AAP and the American Heart Association. 

While public trust was falling before the pandemic, it undoubtedly worsened this trend as people looked to the White House for guidance on how to react to the outbreak. Advice from the White House was criticized for at times seeming to conflict with itself or for changing too quickly. 

Consistency in language is not what engenders stronger public health, said Jamieson, but rather “whether you’re accurately representing what you do and don’t know.” 

“Very early in the pandemic, the scientific spokespersons were speaking in a language of certainty which did not represent the level of knowledge that they had,” Jamieson said.  

Kennedy notably shies away from certainties in his rhetoric, often arguing that his skepticism of mainstream science is simply asking questions. And yet he scored the lowest among the entities included in Annenberg’s survey. 

Jamieson noted that while Kennedy’s method of always questioning things is consistent with the scientific approach, it’s unclear whether he’s open to accepting new data when it comes to him.  

“At what point is there a sufficient amount of data opposing what he has already concluded? What level of preponderance of evidence on the other side of something that he has concluded, would it take to get him to change his mind?” Jamieson said. 

She further noted the secretary often takes the lack of certainty as evidence that something may be true, giving the example of the unproven theory that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine could be linked to autism. Despite decades of studies failing to establish a link, Kennedy has refused to discount this theory, even when confronted by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) during one of his confirmation hearings. 

“Well, science can’t prove anything. There’s always going to be some possibility, but it becomes more and more and more remote as you ask every possible question,” she said.  

Primary care providers scored the best overall, with 86 percent of survey respondents expressing confidence in their doctor providing trustworthy public health information. 

“What I think a key component is you’re often going to those professions when you’re in need and sometimes, you’re at the most vulnerable, right? So, it’s important that you trust your physician when you’re concerned about symptoms. You’re concerned about your longevity,” American Medical Association CEO John Whyte told The Hill. 

Whyte echoed Jamieson’s opinion that a disconnect in communication is a likely factor in why people are losing trust in public health authorities. 

“When you have some of the people that are communicators, they might be good subject matter experts in the government, but they’re not necessarily relatable and understand how to communicate to people,” Whyte said.  

“So, that’s why I think you see people looking for other sources of information, whether it’s right or wrong. That’s sometimes why influencers have been successful. They look like you, they talk like you and you assume they have information when they usually don’t have all the right information.” 

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