Dr. Debra Houry, the former chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has damaged the agency’s credibility at a scale that will be hard to repair.
Houry made the criticism in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’s Face the Nation. According to The Hill, Houry said Kennedy’s leadership has coincided with a steep decline in public confidence in federal health advice.
“I think the secretary has caused a lot of irreparable harm,” Houry said, citing polling that she said shows trust in public health, and in the CDC specifically, has dropped by more than 20 points in many surveys.
Houry pointed to a concrete sign of that loss of standing: some states, she said, are removing links to CDC webpages and turning instead to other medical organizations. That is not a branding problem. CDC guidance works through adoption by state health departments, clinicians, schools, and the public. If those channels stop treating the agency as the default reference, the machinery gets noisy fast.
Polling shows a sharp drop
A survey by Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab found that 50 percent of 2,205 U.S. adults said they trust health recommendations from the CDC. The poll was conducted from March 19 through April 1.
The same pollsters found a much higher level of trust in spring 2025, when 77 percent of respondents in a similar survey said they trusted CDC recommendations. Houry cited that kind of movement as evidence that the agency’s reputation has been weakened quickly and may not recover quickly.
“That’s really difficult to recover from,” Houry said on CBS. “I don’t know how you build back that trust overnight.”
Kennedy’s health agenda faces broader criticism
Kennedy has drawn criticism over his vaccine views, his attacks on Tylenol, his handling of a measles outbreak, and procedural fights involving federal vaccine policy. Techdirt has reported on court and administrative setbacks for HHS under Kennedy, including a preliminary injunction tied to vaccine schedule changes and charter changes involving the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that were pulled after process problems.
The public-health stakes are straightforward. Federal health agencies do not enforce most recommendations by sheer command. They depend on credibility, repetition, and cooperation from states and medical institutions. Houry’s warning is that Kennedy’s tenure has cut into that trust, and that the repair job would require more than swapping out a memo or rewriting a webpage.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.