In my many, many posts about RFK Jr. and his disastrous tenure as Secretary of HHS, there are two themes that have hopefully broken through all the noise.
The first is that Kennedy is a miserable communicator, in a way that is totally purposeful. He talks out of both sides of his mouth all the time, such that he’s able to claim to both sides of the vaccine “debate” that he’s said what they want him to say. “Go get the MMR vaccine” he’ll say when confronted by a measles crisis that is spinning out of control. Then he’ll get in front of anti-vaxxer groups and brag about how he is changing the childhood MMR vaccine schedule, while claiming it is untested and dangerous. This leaves the public confused. It’s how you get outbreaks of once-defeated diseases.
The second is that the public generally understands that Kennedy is a problem and doesn’t like what he’s doing. We saw that trend begin in polling going back to the middle of 2025, as well as when the White House briefly flirted with understanding that Kennedy’s bullshit was becoming a massive liability for the now-approaching midterms.
Well, more recent polling demonstrates both of these things together in one poll. The public is generally confused about what Kennedy’s stance on the MMR vaccine is, but they are not at all confused about the fact that they hate him. Let’s start with the MMR vaccine.
Americans’ uncertainty of where Kennedy stands on the MMR vaccine might in large part be traced back to Kennedy himself. He has rarely provided unflinching support for the highly effective vaccine.
More than 1,900 adults responded to the poll, conducted from August 4 to 17. Of all participants, 31% correctly stated that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, up from 23% in August 2025. But most indicated that Kennedy either doesn’t recommend the vaccine (29%) or are unclear about his position (40%).
I will quibble slightly with the wording in the post, specifically the word “correctly.” This is putting way, way too much weight on Kennedy’s statements that people should in fact get the vaccine. While he’s done that, I’ve already described how Kennedy talks out of both sides of his mouth on the subject. Kennedy has spent his entire career claiming that vaccines are dangerous in part because they aren’t tested. He’s made other claims about the ingredients in the MMR vaccine being deadly or causing other afflictions like autism, even long after those ingredients were removed. To view his statement that he wants people to get a vaccine that he claims is dangerous and untested as though it came with a wink and a pair of crossed-fingers isn’t in any way unreasonable. To claim the only correct answer to the polling question is that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine is simplifying things in the extreme.
Later in the post, CIDRAP even acknowledges much of this when talking about the current measles outbreak.
On August 2, after years of unproven claims about the MMR vaccine and an assertion that childhood vaccines cause autism, Kennedy denied responsibility for the measles outbreaks. “I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine,” he said on CNN. “A measles vaccine is effective. It stops measles in about 97% of the cases.”
But the overall point here is that Kennedy’s purposeful waffling is the direct cause of a public that is confused on what Kennedy actually wants them to do to combat the measles outbreak and plays a huge part in the outbreak existing to begin with. This resurgence absolutely is his fault. It’s his life’s work, in fact.
And the public appears to be very aware of that in his favorability polling and the negative side of the respondents is getting more extreme.
A total of 23% of respondents said that their opinion of Kennedy is favorable, unchanged from August 2025. Half report an unfavorable view of him, with 42% saying they see him very unfavorably and 8% somewhat unfavorably. While the public’s overall unfavorable rating of Kennedy has not changed since August 2025, significantly more participants said their opinion is very unfavorable in 2026 than in 2025 (42% vs 37%).
That the White House hitched its wagon to this absolute turd of a cabinet secretary is strategic political suicide. It makes no sense. Trump could raise his favorability ratings full points almost immediately by firing this clown and committing to actually sound healthcare policy. That may sound like a small thing overall, but in the current climate of political inertia, it really isn’t.
I can’t explain why Kennedy has such as grip on Trump. I don’t know why it is that the White House is so enamored with this kind of political weight as it swims towards a midterm election that sure looks like it’s going to be a GOP ass-kicking.
But I do know we’re all worse off for it.