Vaccine skepticism among Americans is widespread, The POLITICO Poll found, indicating that one of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s animating priorities is gaining traction.
Results from the March poll of 3,851 U.S. adults conducted by Public First show that a plurality of Americans question the safety of vaccines, support reducing the number administered and believe that people’s right to decide what they put in their bodies is more important than preventing the spread of disease.
Nearly half of U.S. adults surveyed last month signaled they think the science on vaccines remains up for debate and that it’s damaging to require people to receive them, rather than that the science is clear and it is dangerous to challenge it.
A clear partisan divide exists among vaccine skeptics. Six in 10 Republicans surveyed favored administering fewer vaccines, compared to three in 10 Democrats.
Republican respondents are also much more likely to doubt the science behind vaccines instead of saying the science is clear when compared to Democrats, even after controlling for age, income, gender and education, according to a POLITICO analysis of the March poll.
While only a third of respondents said they see reducing vaccines as a core principle of the Make America Healthy Again movement — which was founded by Kennedy and credited with helping President Donald Trump win in 2024 — those who associate themselves with the movement are more likely than others to be skeptical of vaccines.
This includes the 22 percent of self-identified MAHA supporters who plan to vote Democrat in November.
The results made sense to Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy led before entering politics.
“What stands out is that vaccine safety and vaccine choice are no longer fringe issues,” she told POLITICO of the survey’s results. “People want to be able to make their own medical decisions.”
Underscoring the intensity of vaccine-skeptical beliefs: Respondents who said they’d rather allow vaccine-preventable diseases like measles return, in order to protect people’s freedom to decide what to put in their bodies, trailed those who said they’d prefer they not by just 8 percentage points.
Those who said the return of such diseases wasn’t a risk worth taking made up 47 percent, compared to 39 percent who said it was.
Once again, the split was pronounced along party lines, with 58 percent of Democratic voters saying the return of infectious diseases is not worth the risk and a plurality, or 49 percent, of GOP voters saying that was a price worth paying for the ability to refuse vaccines.
Kennedy and allies like National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya point to the pandemic, the promise of President Joe Biden that Covid vaccines would eliminate the disease, and Biden’s bid to require workers to get vaccinated as the reason for declining trust.
“Science should be an engine for knowledge and freedom, not something where it stands on top of society and says, ‘You must do this, this and this, or else,” Bhattacharya told senators at a hearing last year. “It shouldn't be pushing mandates for vaccines, like the Covid vaccines, that were tested for a relatively short period of time.”
He added: “I took the Covid vaccine myself, but I think that the mandates that many scientists pushed have led to the lack of confidence that so many of the public has in science.”
The Covid pandemic “broadened that coalition” of anti-vaccine activists that had long been dominated by women by mobilizing men and right-leaning individuals who opposed masking and stay-at-home requirements, said Anna Kirkland, a University of Michigan professor focused on law and health politics.
Now that Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine advocate, is the country’s top health official, “he is reaching a lot of people, including people who haven’t paid much attention before” to vaccines, Kirkland said.
Since he was sworn in as health secretary in February 2025, Kennedy has overseen the elimination of some Covid-19 vaccine recommendations, the whittling down of the childhood vaccine schedule and an overhaul of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel — though a federal judge temporarily stayed most of those actions last month.
Kennedy also directed the CDC to change longstanding language on its website disavowing a link between vaccines and autism and suggested that he’ll overhaul the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program — a system many of his allies want to see dismantled so vaccinemakers can face liability claims.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies have cheered him on from the sidelines, amplifying his messaging on social media and in weekly Zoom calls with MAHA leaders. Children’s Health Defense has gone further, backing lawsuits to bolster Kennedy’s anti-vaccine priorities. It is also part of a coalition pushing bills in about a dozen states to eliminate medical mandates, including immunization requirements for school entry.
But a sizable number of Americans are not on board with going that far. More than a third of those surveyed agreed that vaccine risks are very rare and that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh them for most people. And 44 percent of adults believe vaccines should be mandatory for children to attend school.
Every state requires schoolchildren to receive vaccines, though most offer exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons. At least a dozen state legislatures are considering bills this year to loosen or eliminate the requirements, but just one — Idaho — has passed legislation since Kennedy took office that largely bans vaccine mandates for students and kids in daycare. Meanwhile, several others have moved to ensure their laws or regulations permit their health authorities to base their vaccine requirements on the recommendations of non-federal experts, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Just over half of respondents said parents should be required to vaccinate their kids against dangerous diseases to protect them and their community. A large minority — 41 percent — said the government’s role on vaccines is to provide advice and information on behaviors that are most beneficial to the population.
The responses seesawing between vaccine skepticism and support suggest a “very movable middle” of Americans that the public health community needs to reach, said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist, former CDC consultant and CEO of Your Local Epidemiologist, a public health science newsletter geared toward average Americans.
“There's no doubt that these topics have been brought up to the forefront this past year,” Jetelina said. Scientists and health professionals, she added, must adapt to address the public’s attitudes “not where we wish they were, but where they actually are.”
Polls conducted since Kennedy became HHS secretary show broad support for the childhood vaccine schedule as it stood before the department sought changes. Trump’s own campaign pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, wrote in a December memo that a November survey they took showed removing established recommendations for shots against diseases like whooping cough, measles and hepatitis was popular with just one in five voters in competitive congressional districts — and only a third of self-described MAHA voters.
“The MAHA agenda is widely popular across party lines EXCEPT for vaccine skepticism, including among MAHA voters,” they wrote — a warning the White House has taken to heart as HHS officials have pivoted to highlighting Kennedy’s approach to food policy reforms.
Still, other surveys have found that trust in vaccine safety is slipping among Americans, especially Republicans who are increasingly more likely to favor parental opt-outs for school immunization requirements.
The largest share of POLITICO Poll respondents — 41 percent — said Republicans as a political party are most worried about vaccine side effects. But they were more divided over which party “would challenge big pharmaceutical companies” — 29 percent favored Republicans while 33 percent said Democrats would. The remainder was divided among those who don’t know or who think both parties or neither party would take on the industry.
Slightly over a third said the government should prioritize population-level health, even at the expense of individual decision-making. But a plurality of those surveyed, 47 percent, said the government should favor individual freedom to make health choices, even if that poses risks to collective health.
Over half of respondents said Americans have a duty to be vaccinated to protect other Americans — a sentiment that rises to two-thirds of adults 65 and older who are old enough to remember a time before vaccines controlled serious childhood illnesses, as well as two-thirds of adults who said they voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election or said they plan to vote Democratic this November.
Meanwhile, more than a third said Americans are responsible only for themselves, and have no duty to be vaccinated to protect others. Nearly half of MAHA voters said they hold that view.
The seemingly growing belief in “health freedom” — or the idea that people should have full control over their health decisions with minimal government interference — was not surprising to some health care experts.
“It's reflective of general amnesia that people just haven’t seen these diseases recently, so to them the tradeoff is reasonable,” Jetelina said.
James Colgrove, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who’s studied the history of vaccines, said the data reflects “the convergence” of the internet’s rise — and its ability to amplify misinformation — with post-Covid political polarization.
The resulting decline of public trust in “scientific experts and medicine is probably more significant than amnesia or lack of awareness over the effects of once-common childhood diseases,” Colgrove said. He expressed doubt that more frequent measles outbreaks would — as some public health experts have indicated — convince skeptics of the seriousness of the disease when their distrust of doctors or the drug industry runs so deep.
“We’re all kind of in the post-truth era, and it’s an epistemological crisis,” he said. “Everybody's living in their own reality, and you interpret the facts in a way that reinforces your belief system.”
Nearly half said parents should be the “final decision makers” on matters of their children’s health, even if they buck expert advice; among MAHA voters who plan to cast their ballots for GOP midterm candidates, that grows to 58 percent. Thirty-eight percent of those polled said the government and medical experts should have the power to mandate “some things that are best for children’s health” regardless of how parents feel.
From a broad historical perspective, there was only a brief period in the decades after World War II when vaccination was less “politically contentious,” said Elena Conis, a University of California, Berkeley professor and author of “Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization.”
Part of the reason vaccines were made mandatory for children for school entry, she said, is that “it’s always been hard to vaccinate adults” due to a level of resistance, “and vaccinating children…was the most expedient way to get a healthy adult population.”
Jessie Blaeser contributed.
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