Last week, doctors and scientists across the country persuaded Americans to vote them into office. Now comes the hard part: Convincing those who didn’t trust them to believe in their mission.
Doctors and public health officials ran pro-vaccine, pro-science campaigns and won over voters even in traditionally conservative areas. Candidates endorsed by the organization 314 Action, which works to elect Democratic doctors and scientists, flipped 10 congressional seats in last week’s election.
“What we saw in the results is that when these scientists really leaned into their scientific and medical backgrounds, that only provided their potential constituents with more trust,” said Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action. “They are looked at as truth tellers and that really is what people want.”
But the midterm results also clearly demonstrate that Americans remain deeply divided on core scientific issues, with some communities remaining distrustful of the cornerstones of public health policy.
South Carolina elected a pediatrician, Annie Andrews, as the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate since 2005, but it also voted for 18 officials who publicly pledged to remove Covid vaccines from the market, according to the anti-vaccine advocacy group Americans for Health Freedom.
Across the nation, more than 120 lawmakers publicly opposed to Covid shots were elected to office, according to Americans for Health Freedom. Anti-vaccine sentiment in statehouses has the potential to reshape vaccine policy. Last year, several states passed into law bills that vaccine advocates say would curb vaccine distribution and uptake.
On a statewide level, not all elections went pro-science either. While much attention has been paid to Ohio’s decision to elect Democrat Amy Acton, who led the state’s Covid response, as its next governor, Florida’s next governor will be Byron Donalds, who has said removing all state vaccine requirements would be a “step in the right direction.” Donalds’ challenger, David Jolly, publicly pledged to “bring back science, data, math, vaccines, and public health.”
Brian Castrucci, a Republican who leads the de Beaumont Foundation, which promotes public health, told STAT newly elected public health experts must now answer the question: Why should I trust you?
“We can answer that question, but it’s not going to be by telling people they’re wrong,” Castrucci said.
The newly elected class of doctors and scientists seem particularly well suited to make the case for why their advice on topics like infectious disease should be heeded, several public health experts said. Andrews, for example, has taken to social media to encourage vaccination and has encouraged other doctors to do the same. Castrucci called El-Sayed “one of the best communicators I have ever met in my career .”
Able communicators joining Congress
“Having leaders who can really communicate how devastating these policies have been and the consequences, I think, is really, really helpful,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, CEO of the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat who will represent Michigan in the Senate, has written about the need to improve communication with those who are skeptical of science. “Yelling ‘trust the science!’ at someone who’s afraid of vaccinating does little to allay their underlying fear. Rather, it gives them more reason not to trust — you, the vaccine, ‘the science,’” he wrote in a column for the Detroit Metro Times in 2024.
In an interview with STAT Wednesday, he argued that “the root cause of the distrust in public health has less to do with distrust in science and a lot more to do with distrust with greed.”
El-Sayed said he hopes to build trust through his efforts to “reinvigorate a movement for public health that is willing to stand up to the power of big corporations,” and to “show the grifters for who they are.”
El-Sayed has made no secret of his desire to use his new power to investigate the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., telling STAT prior to the election that he is eager to “grill” the secretary.
Democrat Richard Pan, a physician elected to represent Sacramento County, Calif., in the House of Representatives, told STAT that while building back trust is going to be difficult, the first step is to “expose the corruption and bad decision-making” of the current administration.
“This administration and RFK Jr. and the people who he has appointed … have all undermined the idea that you can actually trust the federal government,” he said.
Following the election, several Democratic lawmakers, including Patty Murray, vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, renewed calls for Kennedy to step down or be fired. A number of Democratic lawmakers have been calling for Kennedy’s ouster for more than a year, citing a lack of confidence in his ability to “carry out the duties of his office.”
Democrats hope gaining the power to subpoena Trump administration officials will allow them to make headway on the investigations they launched when they were in the minority.
“We’ve not even really been able to get information out of RFK and the department,” Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, told STAT. The Democratic majority in Congress means “we’re going to be able to do really vigorous oversight, help people understand how we are fighting for them, and then giving them accurate information,” she added.
Questioning RFK Jr.
While much of the work of congressional investigations occurs behind closed doors through document requests, subpoenas, and sworn depositions, it could also mean Kennedy is brought before congressional committees now under Democratic control, to answer for various policy decisions under oath. Some lawmakers are indicating he will be a frequent guest on Capitol Hill.
“Unless RFK Jr. is interested in spending the next two years in front of Congressional committees, he should go ahead and resign now,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) tweeted after the election. Andrews has called Kennedy her “professional archnemesis for decades.”
El-Sayed acknowledged Wednesday that perhaps too much focus is on Kennedy himself, rather than his decisions. “Any investigation that we’re doing is about trying to correct the problems and address the flaws and the faults, rather than trying to achieve any sort of retribution,” El-Sayed said.
Several other Democratic lawmakers agreed that their intention in the next Congress will not be to weaponize or politicize science, but to restore faith in the existing system.
“Democrats will work to restore our scientific infrastructure and integrity and end this administration’s politicization of science,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement. There is also hope among some Democrats that these inquiries can be bipartisan. Republicans are “not all happy with what’s happened to the science programs,” said Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who wants to lead the House Science Committee.
Still, there could be risks in aggressively investigating Kennedy. Research suggests that political fights over vaccines can be a net negative for vaccine acceptance. A 2015 paper found that statehouse debates over the HPV vaccine, for example, resulted in “decreases in support for HPV vaccine requirements, state immunization programs, and confidence in doctors and in government.”
Still polarized
It’s an open question whether engaging in a political debate with Kennedy will serve to deepen skepticism of public health measures, or whether polarization over vaccines has already hit a ceiling, said Sarah Gollust, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
“I’m not sure it can get worse in terms of how politically charged the vaccine issue has been since Covid-19,” said Gollust, one of the 2015 paper’s authors. “We’ve never been here before. We are in very new territory.”
When asked about this potential risk, Pan downplayed the number of ardent Kennedy supporters who currently exist and would be further emboldened by Democrats’ fights with the HHS secretary. “There’s only a very small number of people who really believe in RFK Jr.,” Pan said.
Exactly how true that is remains up for debate. Several candidates endorsed by Kennedy’s MAHA movement did lose elections last week. And Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not always top of mind, even for self-described MAHA movement followers. An April 2026 survey of self-described MAHA voters found that just 10 percent identified re-evaluating vaccine safety as their top priority.
Nevertheless the number of parents opting their children out of vaccines continues to grow across the country. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that vaccine exemptions grew in 41 states and the District of Columbia between the 2024 and 2025 school years.
Even if Democrats can convince a sizable group of Republicans to trust their vaccine advice over Kennedy’s, a small and growing number of vaccine skeptics can cause public health havoc.
Though Andrews was able to convince more than 1 million South Carolinians to support her pro-science message, it was a relatively small group of vaccine skeptics in Spartanburg County, in the northwestern corner of the state, that prompted the state’s 2025 measles outbreak, which at the time was the largest in the United States since measles was formally eliminated in 2000. (Pennsylvania’s current outbreak has since topped South Carolina’s record, with more than 1,500 cases.)
There are some signs that pro-vaccine messages are beginning to resonate in these communities. Andrews’ message of impeaching RFK received an ovation in Spartanburg County during the campaign, and she did perform better there than Democratic candidates of the past. But as of now, the region still has a vaccination rate low enough that it is vulnerable to continued resurgences of measles.
As Andrews acknowledged in an op-ed during the campaign: “Trust doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It takes years to build and minutes to burn.”
STAT’s coverage of trust in science and public health is supported by the Dana Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.