What the Polls Say about the Pharmaceutical Industry and Vaccines

Author: Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute, February 21, 2026, Reprinting by Malone.News requested by the author.

We keep hearing whispers that the Trump administration wants to get the spotlight off pharmaceuticals and vaccines ahead of the midterms. Instead, the focus should be on cleaning up the food as the path to great American health. The messaging around food polls better, they say, whereas the pressure on vaccine makers and culling of the childhood schedule is a political loser. So they say.

We’ll get to whether this is true (evidence is weak or non-existent) but first a comment on campaigning by polling. The Trump movement has defied the polls constantly for ten years, choosing populist instincts instead as campaign thematics. That has worked. How many times must conventional polling fail before the political class gets the message that they should not determine messaging?

In any case, let’s look at the evidence we have.

Gallup has measured confidence in industry for a quarter of a century. During this time, the status of the pharmaceutical industry has only fallen. Now it rates second-to-last of 25 industries right above government itself.

In 2020, 34 percent of those polled had negative or somewhat negative views. That is now 58 percent, with only 28 percent expressing some confidence. That’s rock-bottom.

A Gallup poll from 2022 reveals scant support for Covid vaccine mandates in schools, with only 13 percent of Republicans favoring them in elementary schools and only 18 percent for them in college. In general, more than 80 percent of Republicans oppose such mandates, which is exactly the reverse of Democrats, though this poll was four years ago and that has likely changed too. Independents are split.

Back in 1992, the public overwhelmingly supported vaccination requirements in general: 80% for and only 17% against. Those numbers are on the verge of crossing, according to Gallup. Even with a vaguely worded question clearly biased toward positive answers, 45% now say government should stay completely out, while only 51% support vaccination requirements.

We should be particularly struck by the trends in answers to the following absurdly biased question: “How important is it that parents get their children vaccinated?” The easy answer is it is important. Pollsters know that you would only construct such a question if you are going for an overwhelmingly positive answer.

To say it is not important is to mark yourself as a radical with a sudden burden of proof to show the science. It’s almost like asking if apple pie is American. And yet even here, we see dramatic declines in the numbers.

This poll reveals a notable intensity on the subject.

Republican parents are far less likely than Democratic parents to have high confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness (45% vs. 71%), safety testing (29% vs. 63%), and the vaccine schedule (27% vs. 58%), according to Pew. We are starting to see change even on the MMR vaccine that one might expect to be nearly noncontroversial with the public at large. Republicans in particular are less willing to endorse even this one. Meanwhile, a pharma-biased Annenberg poll shows “statistically significant erosion in support” for common vaccines based on concerns over safety.

The results of a Fabrizio poll from February 2026 have not been made publicly available. But a memo released from Tony Lyons of MAHA Action reports even more salient facts. A plurality of all voters believe that families should be given a choice over vaccination.

Also, the same poll shows overwhelming opposition to the liability shield that currently protects vaccine makers. Removing these protections from pharma is overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

The same poll asked “Are you concerned about any negative health impacts from any required or optional vaccines?” A strong majority of Republicans (67%) said yes. This figure rose to 79% when filtered for strong supporters of President Trump.

In sum, we live in times of grave doubt about pharma, vaccine proliferation, vaccine safety, and everything associated with government and industry as it relates to injections. Indeed, this is an issue that brought Trump to power with MAHA voters providing the margin of victory. Repealing the liability shield in particular is a popular agenda item.

Why, then, would there be people now whispering that all Republicans should shut up on the whole topic? The answer appears to trace to a horribly biased poll from December. It has everyone spooked, though very clearly the poll is badly constructed.

The Bad Poll That Shook the Republicans

Let’s take a close look at a Fabrizio poll conducted back in early December 2025. The pollster said: “Republican and Democratic candidates who support eliminating long standing vaccine requirements will pay a price in the election.…Vaccine skepticism is bad politics.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times identifies this poll as the one that rattled Republicans. “Just one in five voters approves of rolling back established vaccine recommendations…according to the Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward.”

Look at this preposterous statement to which respondents were asked to agree or disagree: “Vaccines save lives.” Also: “Vaccines are the best defense against many infectious diseases.” No surprise: you get overwhelming majorities agreeing with both statements.

This is shabby polling. To disagree with the statement “Vaccines save lives” means that you would have to believe that in the 228 years since the invention of vaccination, they have not saved lives. That’s an absurd statement. Clearly vaccines have saved lives. If you are bitten by a rabid dog, are you going to get a rabies shot? Of course and it will save your life.

The statement is hardly in question apart from a few radicals among whom I cannot count myself. In fact, it’s shocking that 10 percent would disagree.

That such a question would appear on a poll reveals that it is not even slightly objective.

We could observe the same about the second question about vaccines as defenses: yes, some vaccines are sterilizing. No kidding. The chickenpox shot generally stops chickenpox. That remains true even if you think that natural infection is preferred for its broader and more durable immunity. Same with measles.

Why are such preposterous questions on a poll? To skew the results.

This poll is indescribably bad. For example, it asked opinions on the following: “remove established childhood vaccine recommendations for diseases like whooping cough, measles, hepatitis, and others.”

No surprise that people said no. Change the wording a bit and you would get a completely different answer. For example, why add “established” to the sentence? That’s introducing bias.

And why “recommendations” versus requirements – they mutate magically once laundered through agencies, schools, and workplaces – which is what is really in question. This poll was designed to get the results it did.

For example, look at how they laid out what candidates would emphasize. The pollsters offer five warm fuzzies and then three more controversial and edgy, the last one of which is completely misworded and convoluted. Is it any wonder that it produced the results it did?

Here is yet another absurdity. The poll asks parents “do you or did you” follow vaccination recommendations by “their pediatrician or health care provider.” No shock here that the overwhelming majority say yes. There obviously would have been very different results to a simple question of whether parents are more or less inclined to follow government recommendations for all past shots in the future.

Who commissioned this monstrosity of a poll? The answer is that Fabrizio does not say. We simply do not know. Does that raise alarm bells? It should.

Republicans and everyone: do better at examining these polls, how they are conducted, the questions they ask, and how they fit with the conclusions penned by the pollsters themselves. Use your good sense here and ask how the questions could be different to produce different results.

Someone commissioned this December Fabrizio poll to produce exactly the results it did, and give fodder to whomever wants Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be quiet on the explosion of the vaccine schedule, the mandates for shots, and the indemnification of the entire industry.

In the bigger picture, the entire world shut down just a few years ago – destroying countless businesses, communities, and lives – so that we could wait for a pharmaceutical product that turned out to be ineffective and caused enormous harm. This has caused the industry’s reputation to go into a tailspin and prompted a huge populist outcry to stop the madness.

Today, the entire pharmaceutical industry is in disrepute even as governments and schools still require people to take their products as injections at all ages. We are supposed to believe that it is politically dangerous for Republicans to talk about this, all based on this one poll that is essentially a hoax and an obvious one? Absurd.

What we need right now is a fair poll, in plain language, that deals with existing realities, that generates objective results. Who is up to the task?

---