A new Harvard poll documents the 27 point fall. State health departments, doctors, and academic groups are now issuing the guidance the agency used to send, and the consistency of what they send is the next public health question.
Americans still trust the person who draws their blood. They have lost faith in the agency that tells that person what to look for.
A year ago, 77% of U.S. adults said they trusted health recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, half do. The 27-point drop, documented in a June 9, 2026 poll from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation, leaves CDC standing well below the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists Americans have continued to trust at 80% or higher. Only 12% of U.S. adults now say they trust CDC recommendations "a great deal," according to the poll report.
The 77% baseline came from a Harvard/de Beaumont "100 Days" poll fielded in April 2025, shortly after new federal public-health leadership took office. Trust in the agency had been relatively stable around 75% from 2022 through that point. The fall came in the year that followed.
The slide is not uniform, and that matters for how the country absorbs it. Trust among Democrats collapsed from 92% to 34%. Independents fell from 77% to 47%. Among Republicans, the number actually ticked up, from 63% to 67%, the poll report shows. That partisan divergence is the most-cited finding. It is not the most important one for the average reader, who is more likely to feel the loss in the consistency of the guidance they receive than in any poll crosstab.
The bigger story is what the collapse does to the plumbing. CDC guidance is what tells school districts when to require a second MMR dose, what tells employers when to bring workers back after a respiratory outbreak, what tells state and local health departments which strain to sequence and which travel advisory to issue. When half the country stops trusting the source, someone else has to issue those calls, and they are issuing them unevenly.
State and local health departments are now where the federal agencies used to be. Trust in state public health departments fell from 80% to 66%, and local departments from 82% to 70%, according to the same Harvard/de Beaumont survey. Those departments are still the level of government Americans trust most on health. De Beaumont president Brian C. Castrucci noted that state and local health departments are now substantially more trusted than federal agencies, and that "science should not be a point of view" — a remark that implicitly captures the gap federal departures have created.
The downstream cost shows up first in vaccination. Support for requiring childhood vaccines for school is still 77% nationally, including 65% of Republicans, the poll found. But 42% of adults now say they want the childhood schedule reduced, and the share who call vaccines "very safe" has fallen from 70% during the COVID peak to 57%. Confidence is slipping even where the policy preference has not. That gap is the leading indicator of the next outbreak response: parents who still vaccinate, but who delay, hesitate, or skip one dose.
The substitution is uneven on the federal side as well. Trust in the FDA stands at 53% and trust in the National Institutes of Health at 53%, the survey reports, well above the CDC's 50% but well below the 80% that nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and major voluntary health associations still command. The clinical workforce is the part of the system that has not broken. That is also the part that depends most on what the CDC used to publish.
Public health researchers and medical associations have been explicit about the stakes. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and state-level pediatric societies have publicly criticized recent HHS and CDC actions, including changes to the routine childhood immunization schedule, as endangering children's health, according to Scientific American's reporting on the poll. The public mood that produced those statements is captured in the poll: 55% of Americans disapprove of federal public health agencies' actions over the past year, 68% say recommendations were too influenced by leaders' personal beliefs, and only 38% agree agencies are following the best available science.
The work of filling the gap has already begun, though unevenly. State health departments, academic institutions, and community clinics are now issuing guidance, running forecasts, and coordinating outbreak response in places the CDC used to lead. The poll does not measure how well that substitution is going. It only shows that the federal standing Americans used to rely on is no longer the default.
The number to watch is not the CDC's 50%. It is the next outbreak response that lands unevenly across state lines, the next school-entry exemption rate that climbs in one district and not another, the next time a state health officer has to issue guidance the CDC used to send. Trust in a public health agency is civic infrastructure, and the poll shows what happens when the infrastructure is no longer trusted: the work does not stop. It just moves. And it stops arriving at the same time in the same place for the same people.