MORE AMERICANS DOUBT VACCINES THAN TRUST THEM
Can you feel the Reckoning approaching? Politico does. Wait till you see this development. Yesterday, Politico published the results of its own vaccine poll under the headline, “More Americans doubt vaccine safety than trust it, POLITICO Poll finds.” It was a stinker.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/14/poll-rfk-maha-vaccine-safety-americans-00869088?
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The most surprising data point was — even after controlling for age, income, gender and education— how few Democrats agreed that “vaccine science is clear and it is damaging to question it.” Politico could only scrape up a bare majority —52%— meaning that nearly half of surveyed Democrats (!) disagreed with that statement. Republicans went much further —60% of us agreed with the statement that fewer vaccines should be given.
Maybe most importantly, nearly half (47%) said the government should favor individual freedom to make health choices, even if it poses risks to collective health. (Only around a third still favor imposing collective health requirements on everybody else.)
Politico could have buried the survey results, but it didn’t. Equally remarkably, it fairly quoted Mary Holland, from Children’s Health Defense, and Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s current NIH Director. Responding to Politico’s outreach over the poll, Mary said, “What stands out is that vaccine safety and vaccine choice are no longer fringe issues.”
This might be the first time Politico has asked (and then printed) a quote from Mary Holland.
Politico pulled a quote from Bhattacharya’s testimony at a congressional hearing last year. Then, Jay said, “Science should be an engine for knowledge and freedom, not something where it stands on top of society and says, ‘You must do this, this and this, or else.’” In other words, Politico went looking for a quote like that. Just consider what that means.
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? In the same hearing, Bhattacharya observed that “the mandates that many scientists pushed have led to the lack of confidence that so many of the public has in science.” If you want to understand why such a large portion of the American public no longer trusts the public health establishment, you have only to look at how the public health establishment treats the American public.
Imagine you take your car to a mechanic. The mechanic tells you that you absolutely must replace the transmission, or else the car will explode and kill your entire family. He is very insistent. He says the science is settled. He says anyone who questions the transmission replacement is a dangerous lunatic who probably hates grandmothers.
So you let him replace the transmission. And immediately, your car starts making a noise that sounds exactly like a raccoon trapped in a blender.
You take the car back. “My car is making a terrible noise,” you say.
The mechanic looks at you with deep, profound pity. “No it isn’t,” he says. “That sound proves the transmission is working. The science is settled.”
“But I can still hear the raccoon,” you insist.
“You are experiencing a rare, mild adjustment reaction,” the mechanic says. “Furthermore, by even mentioning the raccoon, you are spreading dangerous transmission misinformation. Please leave before I have you banned from the internet.”
This, in a furry nutshell, is the story of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the International “public health establishment.”
? According to Politico’s poll, nearly half of U.S. adults (46%) now believe that the science on vaccines is “up for debate,” and that vaccine mandates are harmful. Only 39 percent still think the science is clear and shouldn’t be questioned. (I bet that number was much higher just a few years back.)
Naturally, public health experts were shocked by this. They simply cannot understand how the public could possibly doubt them. They blame misinformation. They blame social media. They blame Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which the poll showed is gaining ground across party lines.
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But the experts never seem to blame themselves. “We’re all kind of in the post-truth era, and it’s an epistemological crisis,” James Colgrove, a vaccine-pushing professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, complained. “Everybody’s living in their own reality, and you interpret the facts in a way that reinforces your belief system.” In other words: it’s your fault.
But wait! Let’s review the tape! During the pandemic, the experts confidently assured us that the virus wasn’t airborne. Then they said it was. They told us masks were useless. In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci famously went on 60 Minutes and declared, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Then they told us useless masks were mandatory.
When later pressed on this reversal, Fauci admitted that the initial advice wasn’t based on “the science” of mask efficacy, but on the desire to prevent the public from hoarding protective equipment needed by healthcare workers. Translation: We easily lied to you for our own good.
Then came the vaccines. The public health establishment, up to and including the vegetable-like President of the United States, promised absolute immunity. In July 2021, President Biden stated unequivocally: “You’re not going to get covid if you have these vaccinations.” In March 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky went on national television and said, “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.”
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When it turned out that vaccinated people were, in fact, catching and transmitting the virus —often quite enthusiastically— the experts did not say, “Whoops, our bad, we got a little ahead of the data there.” Instead, they acted as if they had never said the first thing at all, casually shifting the goalposts from “prevents infection” to “reduces severe disease,” and suggesting that anyone who remembered their previous absolute guarantees was suffering from a presidential-level cognitive malfunction.
? But the real damage —what truly broke the bond of trust between the public and the medical establishment— was the gaslighting of the vaccine-injured.
Every single medical intervention has risks. Even aspirin kills a certain number of people every year. But when people started showing up at their doctors’ offices with severe, documented neurological or cardiovascular issues —like myocarditis, which even Stanford Medicine allowed occurs in young men at a rate of at least 1 in 32,000 after a second dose— injured patients were warmly welcomed the way a brick welcomes police to a protest.
Doctors, terrified of running afoul of the official CDC narrative or losing their licenses, scolded injured patients that their symptoms were caused by “anxiety” or “stress.” You’re just imagining things. Patients who shared their stories online were flagged for misinformation, shadow-banned, or entirely deleted. Erased.
When these injured patients sought help through the government’s official Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, they stumbled into a bureaucratic black hole. According to data from early 2025, out of more than 13,600 covid vaccine injury claims filed, the government has compensated exactly 26 people. That is less than two-tenths of one percent.
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The government effectively told thousands of suffering people: What you are experiencing did not happen! And if you say it did, you are the enemy. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: You cannot do that to people and expect them to ever trust you again.
When you mandate a medical procedure, tell people it is 100 percent perfectly safe, explicitly promise they “will not get covid,” and then aggressively silence anyone who experiences a severe adverse reaction, you are not protecting public health. You are running a P.R. campaign.
And the American people, whatever our flaws, are remarkably good at detecting the pungent aroma of a P.R. campaign. We’ve probably developed that skill through repeated practice.
Politico’s poll showed exactly what happens when the “experts” prioritize narrative control over honest, transparent communication. They didn’t just lose the argument over covid. They managed to create a massive, bipartisan wave of skepticism about all vaccines, to the point where regular people from all walks of life are now questioning childhood immunizations that have been accepted as “standard” for decades.
It is a spectacular, self-inflicted disaster. The experts built a ladder of absolute certainty, climbed to the very top of it, and then spent three years sawing off the rungs below them. Now they are stuck up there, yelling at the rest of us for refusing to climb up and join them.
And they still can’t hear the raccoon in the blender. I mean, just listen. You guys can hear it, too, right?