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(CN) — Most Americans still say children should be vaccinated against preventable diseases, but a pair of surveys published Tuesday found noteworthy declines in support for requiring inoculation alongside a decrease in distrust against the federal agencies that set public policy.
A survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia found a four-point decline in support for mandating parents to get their children vaccinated against preventable diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. Months before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, Annenberg’s 2019 survey found 77% of Americans polled supported mandating the vaccines for children, compared to the 73% of Americans who supported similar inoculation mandates this year.
The panel surveyed 1,077 adults earlier this month, gauging the public’s preferences on the government setting vaccine policies through mandates. The spring 2019 survey reached 2,344 respondents.
The Annenberg survey revealed sharp political divides underlying perspectives on vaccines, with 86% of Democrats supporting childhood vaccine mandates, an issue on which only 62% of Republicans and 72% of Independents agreed.
Among Republicans, researchers said they found “large increases in support for parents to opt out of having their children vaccinated for medical, religious, and personal or philosophical reasons."
Regardless of political party, most Americans surveyed support letting parents opt out of vaccines for medical reasons, while Democrats and independents are less likely to support religious or personal reasons for abstaining from inoculation.
Although vocal minorities have long questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the groups have found increasing political power with President Donald Trump considering blocking school’s ability to mandate vaccination along with nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a controversial vaccine skeptic, to lead the nation’s health department.
Before running for president, Kennedy led the Children’s Health Defense, an organization advocating for individual parental choice when it comes to vaccines rather than public health mandates. Kennedy’s confirmation hearing begins Wednesday before the U.S. Senate.
On the campaign trail, Trump also suggested he could incentivize states to lift vaccine mandates by hinging federal education funding on open vaccine policies. Although Trump signed several campaign promises into reality last week, he has not yet touched that issue.
While most Americans continue to support mandating childhood vaccines, support for backing “school-related vaccination requirements” dropped from 47% in 2019 to 24% this year.
In a paper for Nature, Philipp Schmid, a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands, posited that mandates are not the only tool for increasing public vaccination rates.
“Mandates are criticized because they aim to bypass rather than overcome the cognitive, emotional and social components of vaccine hesitancy and because they are highly restrictive interventions that can cause unintended psychological effects,” Schmid wrote in the paper.
A KFF Health News poll published Tuesday found parents aren’t just talking about opting out of vaccines but are also acting on it, with a quarter of Republican parents skipping or delaying their children’s vaccines.
Per the survey of 1,310 Americans, only 53% said they trust the Food and Drug Administration’s health recommendations, down from 64% in June 2023.
“When asked about other health institutions, two-thirds (66%) of the public say they trust scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and just over half trust the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (55%) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) (54%) to make the right recommendations on health issues,” researchers explained in a release.
On average, KFF found that 80% of Americans trust their doctors. Democrats trust their doctors more than any other source of health information, whether it’s a government agency or Dr. Mehmet Oz. Among Republicans polled, more than 80% give equal weight to what is recommended by their own doctor, Oz, Trump and Kennedy.
While political opinion on public health issues wax and wane, staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have consistently recommended staying up to date with vaccines to protect individuals and their loved ones from preventable diseases.
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