Americans still trust Fauci more than Kennedy on public health, even after a Senate panel held him in contempt

Half of U.S. adults say they are somewhat or very confident that Anthony Fauci, M.D., provided the public with trustworthy information about matters concerning public health, down from 55% in April, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania released Sept. 9.

Confidence in Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat at 38%, statistically unchanged from 37% in April and 38% in February 2025. That leaves Fauci 12 percentage points ahead of the sitting HHS secretary, down from an 18-point spread four months earlier.

Twenty-four percent of adults surveyed in August said they are very confident in Fauci, and 26% are somewhat confident.

For Kennedy the same tiers came in at 8% and 30%. Forty percent said they are not at all confident in him, unchanged since April.

The share saying they are not at all confident in Fauci rose to 30% from 25% in April, a change APPC's topline marks as statistically significant. Across the waves the center published for this question, going back to October 2023, August is the first in which the unconfident share matched the confident share, at 50% each.

The survey was fielded during the contempt fight

SSRS, an independent research organization, fielded the survey Aug. 4-17 among 1,904 U.S. adults, six days after Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29 and declined to answer questions about the federal COVID-19 response, invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination more than 100 times.

Two days after fielding began, the committee voted along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress. Chairman Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) hand-delivered the referral to the Justice Department that day rather than seek a vote of the full Senate, a departure from the usual route that former prosecutors have said would complicate any case.

Paul has said for years that Fauci belongs in prison and has accused him of concealing the possibility that the pandemic began with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China. David Schertler, Fauci's attorney, called the resolution meritless and politically motivated.

Confidence in Fauci ran between 54% and 58% from February 2025 through April 2026 with no significant movement, and stood at 60% in October 2023, after he led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until leaving government at the end of 2022. Readings from 2021 and 2022, when APPC asked specifically about his COVID-19 guidance rather than public health generally, ranged from 63% to 71%.

Physicians at 87%, agencies below 62%

Eighty-seven percent of the same respondents said they are confident their own doctor, nurse or other primary care provider gives them trustworthy information about public health, statistically unchanged from 88% in September 2024. Confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) came in between 59% and 61%, a spread of 26 to 28 percentage points that has doubled since 2024.

That puts 37 points between the share of Americans who trust their own clinician and the share who trust Fauci, and 49 points between their clinician and Kennedy.

"Things are really confusing right now," Sarah Nosal, M.D., president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said to Medical Economics. Patients arrive having heard something from television, social media or a group chat, she said, and the information does not line up.

"In the end, we're the trusted source for our patients of that information, and whether or not they hear it from the doctor they know and trust, that's how my patients make their vaccine choices," said Nosal, who has practiced family medicine in the South Bronx for nearly two decades.

Consolidation and short appointments cut into the longitudinal relationships those conversations run on, Nosal said, and thinning them out "does put public health at risk."

Sixty-five percent of physicians reported a moderate or major impact from misinformation on their ability to provide quality care this year, up from 57% in 2025, in The Physicians Foundation's survey of 1,002 U.S. physicians fielded in March.

The April wave, the comparison point for the 5-point decline, surveyed 1,639 adults. Interviews were conducted by web and telephone among a nationally representative probability sample drawn from the SSRS Opinion Panel, and panelists who report belonging to other opinion panels are screened out.