Poll: Americans Don't Trust Trump, Oz Or RFK Jr. To Protect Public Health

By contrast, Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, enjoys 45 percent trust. Trust is even higher for existing health agencies, with 66 percent of Americans trusting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 62 percent backing the National Institutes of Health.

His years of attacking the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, certainly doesn’t help Trump’s trustworthiness on health care. Since he began his political career in 2015, Trump has pushed for repealing the program while offering nothing (to this day) to replace it. Trump backed legislation in 2017 that would have left millions of Americans without coverage and was thwarted by a unified Democratic Party and three breakaway Republican senators.

The history of his nominees on health issues also brings significant negatives to the table.

Kennedy has peddled debunked conspiracy theories on a host of medical issues, most notably his false assertion that childhood vaccination is connected to autism. Oz, a failed Senate candidate and former TV host, has been criticized for peddling dubious pills and supporting the privatization of Medicare.

Bhattacharya is an economist at Stanford University who proposed largely allowing COVID-19 to spread—despite the virus’ significant public health risk—while Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, opposed mandatory vaccination, even though vaccination was ultimately key to restoring normalcy across the world.

Arguably, the biggest failure that Trump is associated with in his first presidential term was related to health care. On his watch, over 396,800 Americans died from COVID-19—following months of Trump repeatedly misinforming the public on the severity of the virus and denying states the resources they needed to fight infections.

This new poll from Axios/Ipsos shows that Trump’s narrow election win has not given him any kind of boost on the key issue of public health, and the low quality of his nominees isn’t helping.