Survey shows Americans have more trust in federal scientists than RFK, Jr.
When it comes to health advice, more people trust the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association than federal health agencies, according to a new survey.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia on December 4, 2025.
Megan Warner/Bloomberg via Getty Images
people in america trust scientists There are more people working in federal health organizations than leaders appointed by the Trump administration, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., according to a new survey released Thursday.
Americans also trust independent health and medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), more than US health agencies. Survey respondents were more likely to accept the AAP’s advice about vaccinating newborns against hepatitis B than that of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by a margin of nearly 4 to 1 – 42 percent expressed confidence in the AAP, while 11 percent said they would trust the CDC. The outcome comes as the agency under the Trump administration rescinded its long-standing recommendation that newborns receive universal hepatitis B shots and instead advocated for infants to get the vaccine later in life.
new surveyConducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 1,650 American adults were asked who they trust most in public health. About 67 percent of respondents said they trust scientists working at federal health agencies like the CDC, while less than half—43 percent—said they trust the heads of those same agencies. More survey respondents (54 percent) said they trust Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, who has often been targeted. partisan bitternesscompared to those who said they had confidence in Kennedy (38 percent).
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Meanwhile only 5 percent of survey respondents said they felt “very confident” that leaders at the CDC, the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration provided trustworthy public health information. (The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, says, “It appears that people are paying enough attention to the news to see that there is a discrepancy between what a career scientist might be saying and what agency leadership might be saying,” even if the scientist can’t talk to you right now.
Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement on the survey that confidence in public health began to decline before the current Trump administration. Nixon said, “Secretary Kennedy was brought in to restore credibility through transparency, gold standard science, and accountability. HHS is focused on rebuilding public trust by ensuring that decisions are driven by rigorous evidence.”
The survey underscores a broader attack by the Trump administration on scientists working in government health agencies. Over the past year, the FDA, CDC and NIH have lost thousands of employees, including hundreds of scientists. Kennedy and other administration figures like acting CDC head and NIH head Jay Bhattacharya have pointed to distrust in science as reasons for both the dismissals and the need to change US health policy, but survey results show the public trusts them even less, says Georges Benjamin, chief executive of the American Public Health Association.
“The public is very savvy; they can see that these agencies have been politicized,” Benjamin says. “They can see that career scientists are acting in the public interest based on evidence and scientific findings, and not from partisan motives.”
While scientists are still highly respected in the US, surveys show overall decline There is confidence in him in the country since the Covid pandemic. 1 January Pew Research Center survey found that 61 percent of Americans believe science has had a “mostly positive impact on society” — up slightly by 2023 but a decline from 73 percent in 2019. The sharpest decline in sentiment has been among Republican voters.
“On one hand, we have scientists and public health officials who are guided by the evidence. And on the other hand, we have ideologically motivated individuals who falsely claim that the public has lost trust in scientists and that only they can restore this trust,” says microbiologist Ferrick C. Fang of the University of Washington School of Medicine. “It appears that the majority of the public has not been fooled by this appearance.”
Colette Delavalla, head of the scientific advocacy group Stand Up for Science, says the results are encouraging but notes that survey respondents Skewed toward wealthy, college-educated, political independents, which limits how applicable the results are to Americans as a whole. Jamieson suggests that because the Annenberg Public Policy Center has valued and collected responses from the same respondents since 2021, the survey team has become more confident about the changes seen among them in recent years.
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