New Poll on Vaccines and Autism: Here’s Where Americans Stand

Most Americans don’t agree with claims that vaccines cause autism, and half view Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unfavorably, according to a national survey.

In the August survey of 1,904 U.S. adults from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, most respondents didn’t agree with repeated false claims by Kennedy and President Trump linking vaccines and autism. More than two-thirds of respondents (68%) said it’s false to state that childhood vaccines like those against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) cause autism; 13% said that vaccines cause autism and 19% weren’t sure.

These findings are unchanged since 2022 but do represent a drop from the 74% who’d said it was false to claim a vaccine-autism link in June 2021.

In the latest survey, just over half of the respondents said fully vaccinated children are “about as likely” as those who aren’t to show signs of autism. While 12% of people in February 2026 said fully vaccinated children were more likely to show autism signs, that percentage slipped to 9% in this survey.

A majority of respondents (55%) said they agreed with a statement from the the American Academy of Pediatrics that “Studies have repeatedly found no credible link between life-saving childhood vaccines and autism,” while 18% said their views aligned with new language that now appears on CDC’s website since Kennedy — a prominent anti-vaccine activist before joining government — became the nation’s top health official: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

Unfavorable Views of RFK Jr. Deepen

Half of respondents said their opinion of Kennedy was unfavorable, with the percentage describing their view as “very unfavorable” climbing from 37% last August to 42% in August 2026. The percentage of people who viewing Kennedy as favorably held steady in the last year, at 23%.

Kennedy’s conflicting messages on measles were mirrored in Americans’ own confusion about where he stands on the MMR vaccine. Nearly one-third of survey respondents (31%) said they believed Kennedy recommended that children be vaccinated against measles. That’s up from the same period last year, when 25% said he did. But many respondents still said that either he doesn’t recommend vaccination (29%) or that they weren’t sure what he recommended (40%), the survey found.

“As measles cases rise and the U.S. is poised to lose its measles elimination status, this country is paying the price for skepticism about vaccination against measles that RFK Jr. played a central role in promoting,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PhD, director emerita at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said in a statement. “His ability to address the current U.S. measles outbreaks is hampered by the fact that most adults are either unsure about his stand on childhood vaccination against measles or believe that he does not recommend it.”

Vaccine Policy’s Artful Dodger?

Kennedy’s tenure as health secretary is pockmarked with tepid vaccine endorsements and tendentious vaccine-skeptical pronouncements, even falsely suggesting last year that the MMR vaccine causes deaths each year.

During a 2025 Texas measles outbreak, Kennedy declared, “The federal government’s position, my position, is people should get the measles vaccine, but the government should not be mandating those.” He’s followed such statements with assertions, like the one at an August White House executive order signing ceremony, that childhood vaccines may play a role in causing autism. The secretary also questioned whether recent deaths in Pennsylvania’s current measles outbreak were “fabricated” for political gain.

At a September meeting of the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, the health secretary questioned whether vaccines were linked with chronic diseases and repeated false claims that most vaccines haven’t been tested for safety.

“He gives mixed messages,” Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MedPage Today. “Although I would say largely they’re not mixed — largely they’re just anti-vaccine. He never says a vaccine is safe.”

Ultimately, Kennedy is “an anti-vaccine activist, and he believes he’s doing good,” Offit said. “He thinks that these infections are a small price to pay for what he believes will be an overall decrease in chronic disease because people aren’t vaccinated.”

The public’s confusion about Kennedy’s measles stance comes as the U.S. grapples with its largest tally of measles cases since 1991. As of Sept. 24, the nation already has seen 3,659 reported measles cases, outstripping last year’s total of 2,289 reported cases — a number that had been a post-1991 record until this year.

Controversy is also growing over the number of U.S. measles deaths in 2026, with the CDC reporting only two — with an asterisk indicating this as a number “subject to change” — while Pennsylvania alone has reported five measles-associated deaths amid a statewide measles outbreak that’s reached 943 cases.

Measles is one of the most contagious infectious diseases, and the CDC’s website still cites the MMR vaccine as “the best way to protect against measles.”

Nevertheless, U.S. MMR vaccination rates have been dropping. While the nation’s MMR vaccination rate among kindergartners was 95.2% in the 2019-2020 school year, it slipped to 92.4% in 2025-2026. Vaccine exemptions among U.S. kindergartners climbed from 3.6% in 2024-2025 to 4.2% in 2025-2026, and 24 states have exemption rates above 5%, according to the CDC.