Only half of U.S. adults trust the CDC's public health recommendations, poll finds

By — Hannah Grabenstein Hannah Grabenstein Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/only-half-of-u-s-adults-trust-the-cdcs-public-health-recommendations-poll-finds Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Only half of U.S. adults trust the CDC's public health recommendations, poll finds Politics Jun 9, 2026 6:00 AM EDT Only 50% of Americans say they trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendations to improve public health right now, down from 77% last year, according to a new poll released Tuesday by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation. And half of Americans trust federal public health recommendations less since President Donald Trump began his second term, the poll found. The only group for whom trust in the CDC has increased over the past year are Republican voters — 67% this year, slightly up from 63% when the poll was conducted in April 2025 . Decline in trust is consistent among nearly all the subgroups in the poll of 2,205 U.S. adults. This includes men and women; white, Black and Hispanic people; those living in urban, suburban and rural locations; people with and without college educations; and Democrat and independent voters. Educate your inbox Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else. That partisan breakdown specifically is worrying, said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, adding that the data demonstrate a "deep polarization of facts and science." "We now live in a world where scientific fact is understood through a partisan lens," he said, "and while we can make partisan differences between health facts, disease doesn't discriminate." Measles, Ebola and hantavirus "don't really care what we think," he added. "If we don't have a united response, that is extraordinarily dangerous for our country," he said. Castrucci said the relatively low but consistent rates of distrust among Republicans are unsurprising for a party that favors small government. Fourteen percent of Democrats approve of what federal public health agencies have been doing since the start of Trump's second administration, compared with 80% of Republicans. It remains to be seen if Republican support will drop further if and when there's another Democrat in the White House, he added. Trust in public health institutions has dropped before, but it hasn't declined so substantially and so quickly in the same time period, said Gillian SteelFisher, director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, this poll found that trust in the CDC overall hovered between 74% and 78% from 2022 through 2025. Under the Trump administration, including former anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, many people believe the CDC's health recommendations are influenced by leaders