Routine childhood vaccines retain trust as COVID-19 shots deepen America’s partisan divide

A KFF poll finds strong confidence in polio and MMR vaccines despite renewed political scrutiny, while views on COVID-19 vaccination, pregnancy and proposed schedule changes remain sharply divided.

A new KFF poll suggests that, despite fresh political attention on vaccines, confidence in routine childhood immunisations remains broadly intact, even as views on COVID-19 vaccines remain sharply divided by party. The survey comes after President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking changes to US childhood vaccine recommendations and a Senate investigation into Anthony Fauci, both of which helped push vaccine safety back into the spotlight. According to KFF, majorities of parents and adults still say they are confident that long-established vaccines such as polio and MMR are safe for children, while opinion on COVID-19 vaccines is far more fractured.

The strongest confidence remains attached to vaccines with a longer public record. KFF found that large majorities across party lines say the polio and measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are safe for children, though confidence is lower for hepatitis B and flu shots and splits more noticeably along partisan lines. By contrast, half of adults say they are confident that COVID-19 vaccines are safe for children, but that rises to 77% among Democrats and falls to 21% among Republicans. Even among supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is often associated with scepticism about vaccines, confidence remains high for MMR and polio but drops sharply for COVID-19 vaccines.

KFF also found that the administration’s latest changes to the childhood vaccine schedule have not yet penetrated widely. Most adults and parents said they had heard little or nothing about the effort to alter the schedule, and only a minority said they had heard a lot. Views of the changes are also mixed: four in 10 adults believe the new approach will harm children’s health, while about one in eight think it will help. Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to expect a positive effect, but half of Republicans said they were unsure. Among parents, uncertainty is also widespread, and KFF noted that parents who back the Make America Healthy Again movement were especially likely to say they did not know what the changes would mean.

The poll also points to a stubborn misconception about spacing out childhood vaccines. About half of parents said children are healthier when vaccines are spread out and not given in a single visit, while the other half said there is no strong evidence for that view. KFF said this belief is false, but also not new: previous polling has shown that concern about multiple shots at once is one of the most common reasons parents delay or skip vaccination. The latest results show a deep partisan split, with Republican parents far more likely than Democratic parents to endorse spacing out doses.

Confidence in COVID-19 vaccine safety during pregnancy has weakened further. KFF said 39% of adults now say they are confident those vaccines are safe for pregnant people, down from 53% in May 2022, and the figure is 37% among women of reproductive age. The survey also found that false or misleading claims about miscarriage remain influential: about a third of adults have heard the claim that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy raises miscarriage risk, and only a small share say that statement is definitely false. KFF said most people instead fall into what it describes as the “malleable middle”, where they are unsure whether the claim is true or false.