The Trump administration and Republicans have launched headlong into a broad overhaul of the American vaccine system – despite it being an overhaul that very few Americans seem to actually want.
And there are increasing signs that it’s taken a political toll on the man behind it: US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For the past few years, Kennedy’s image numbers have proven remarkably resilient. Even as he espoused debunked claims about vaccines and science and moved from Democratic presidential candidate to independent to endorsing and serving under President Donald Trump, Americans as a whole have often liked him more than they’ve disliked him.
Whether that’s because of the Kennedy name or anything else, it’s enabled him to obtain significant political power.
But his level of public support appears to be changing, which could also be a bad sign for the man he serves, President Donald Trump, and could give the administration pause about truly turning him loose on vaccines.
Recent polling now shows Kennedy’s numbers are significantly underwater for his performance so far. And perhaps more significantly, very few Americans seem to have strongly favorable feelings toward him or trust him on vaccines.
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Friday showed Americans disapproved of Kennedy’s job performance 55%-42%.
Political independents were even more negative, disapproving 61-34%. And even 21% of Republicans disapproved.
The poll also showed 38% of US adults strongly disapproved of Kennedy, compared to just 15% who strongly approved. So, strongly negative views more than doubled strongly positive ones.
The survey echoes a CBS News-YouGov poll from late August and early September that also showed Americans disapproved of Kennedy by double digits, 55-45%. Similar to the Washington Post poll, independents disapproved 61-39%, and even 20% of Republicans disapproved.
About the only other time Kennedy’s image numbers have been this bad was when he was running for president as an independent in mid-2024 – after he ditched the Democratic Party and was looking like he could potentially siphon votes from Trump. After his endorsement of Trump, his numbers recovered.
And it’s very difficult to divorce his newly negative numbers from his vaccine moves.
Polls have shown that Americans have generally liked the ideas behind his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative – things like healthy eating and targeting processed foods – but they are on a very different page when it comes to vaccines.
The CBS poll showed 70% of Americans said the US government’s policy should be to encourage parents to vaccinate their children “for diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella.” A panel that Kennedy has restocked with his own picks, some of whom have made unproven claims about vaccines, voted this week to stop recommending the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine to children under age 4. (The same panel voted unanimously Friday to shift away from a broad recommendation for Covid-19 vaccines to say that people who want one must consult with a health care provider.)
And about 80% of parents in a September KFF poll said public schools should require students to get the measles and polio vaccines, with some exceptions.
Vaccine skepticism has clearly grown on the right in recent years, but Americans as a whole continue to be very pro-vaccine.
And Americans also seem to have little faith in Kennedy’s leadership on this subject.
A July KFF poll showed 63% of Americans had “not much” or no confidence in Kennedy to provide reliable information about vaccines.
Just 10% expressed a “great deal” of confidence.
The poll also showed significantly more people thought Kennedy’s vaccine moves were making Americans less safe (36%) rather than safer (20%). More than 4 in 10 Americans picked neither option.
What those numbers suggest: Many Americans appear to have been slow to tune in on his moves at HHS.
But that appears to be changing amid the fiasco over Trump firing the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health officials increasingly speaking out, and now Kennedy’s ramped-up efforts to change the vaccine system.
And it’s going poorly for Kennedy.