Americans’ trust in the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine has declined in recent years, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found — despite highly publicized measles outbreaks in three states and mainstream media messaging blaming the outbreaks on the unvaccinated.
Just over three-fourths, or 76%, of Americans said they believe the MMR vaccine is safe for children — dropping from 84%, according to a May 2020 Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The latest four-day poll, completed Monday, included responses from 1,143 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Just 19% of respondents said they approve of the Trump administration’s handling of the measles outbreaks in Pennsylvania, Utah and South Carolina, while 52% said they disapproved.
According to the poll, 45% of Americans are confident in the Democratic Party’s ability to respond to an infectious disease outbreak, compared to 25% who said the Republican Party would do a better job of responding to an outbreak.
According to Reuters, the decline in confidence in the MMR shot has occurred in parallel with a decline in MMR vaccination rates among U.S. kindergarteners.
Reuters cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing MMR vaccine uptake among kindergarteners was 92.4% for the 2025-26 school year, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from 2024-25 (92.5%). For the 2019-20 school year, uptake reached 95.2%.
Greater awareness of vaccine injuries may be behind drop in confidence in MMR shot
Declining trust in the MMR vaccine occurred despite what Reuters called the “worst” measles outbreak in 35 years. As of Sept. 10, the CDC has recorded 3,294 measles cases in the U.S. this year.
There have been four “measles-associated” deaths in the U.S. in 2026. However, according to official CDC figures, there have been no deaths “that indicate measles is the underlying cause.”
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), suggested there are multiple reasons for the growing mistrust of MMR vaccines.
“The declining trust in the MMR vaccine is no surprise given the rise in attention to vaccines and autism and the numerous anecdotal reports ‘on the ground’ of families whose children were damaged by the shot,” he said.
Hooker added:
“The MMR vaccine in its current form has never been appropriately safety tested, and the upper limit of virus levels contained in the vaccine remains unknown since Merck started the practice of ‘overfilling’ the vials in 1999, due to the lack of shelf life for the mumps virus in the vaccine.”
For years, the MMR vaccine has been linked to a high number of adverse events. As of Aug. 28, there were 95,473 adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following MMR vaccination — and 500 deaths.
Historically, fewer than 1% of adverse events have ever been reported to VAERS.
The federal vaccine court in 2010 awarded over $1.5 million to the family of Hannah Poling, who regressed into autism within days of receiving the MMR shot and four other vaccines at age 19 months.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist, said that despite the decline in trust toward the MMR vaccine, the 76% figure in this month’s poll “is not a triumph of vaccine safety, but of a failure of medical communication messaging,” adding that continued support for the MMR shot is fear-based.
Jablonowski said:
“One of the most commonly iterated statistics on the dangers of measles is 1-3 deaths per 1,000. It is a scary number. That number, however, is derived from the 1950s and 1960s, before the discovery of powerful antibiotics, like azithromycin, for secondary infections.
“The estimated number of children who died from measles with 1950s and 1960s medicine was 1 in 6,000 to 1 in 8,000, comparable to an American’s risk of traffic fatality in any given year. Yet, legacy media bombards us with the idea that, in the advent of modern medicine, 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 300 of infected cases are fatal. That’s not a benign estimation error; it’s a communication of false risk to provoke an intended action.”
Despite executive order, monovalent measles shot may take years to develop
In a fiery CNN interview last month, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. strongly defended the Trump administration’s vaccine policies and rejected claims that the policies have helped fuel measles outbreaks.
Kennedy also questioned the safety of routine childhood vaccines and defended efforts to study all possible causes of autism, including vaccines.
A week later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for sweeping changes to U.S. vaccine policy, including reducing the number of diseases for which kids receive routine childhood vaccines from 18 to 11.
The executive order also called for eliminating the combined MMR vaccine in favor of administering three separate single-disease shots once the products are made available in the U.S.
The CDC currently recommends that all children receive two doses of MMR, with the first dose given at 12-15 months and the second dose given between ages 4 and 6.
According to a White House fact sheet, splitting the MMR shot is about increasing parents’ choice over the timing and frequency of the vaccinations.
In an interview with The Defender last month, Hooker, whose son regressed into autism after routine vaccinations at 15 months, supported splitting the MMR shot into separate doses, as it “would allow manufacturers to use lower doses of live viruses in each shot, to avoid virus interference.”
Dr. Robert Malone, one of the new members Kennedy appointed in June 2025 to the CDC’s now-inactive Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told The Defender last month that spacing out the shots reduces the amount of adjuvant that a child’s immune system has to handle in a given time.
This can reduce the child’s risk of vaccine-induced inflammation, particularly cerebral inflammation, Malone said.
The U.S. has primarily used a combined MMR vaccine since 1971, according to T. Joseph Mattingly II, Ph.D., an associate professor and vice chair of research in the Department of Pharmacotherapy at the University of Utah College of Pharmacy.
According to the CDC, two MMR vaccines are available in the U.S. — one made by Merck and the other by GSK. Merck used to make monovalent measles vaccines for the U.S. market but discontinued the single shots in 2008 due to manufacturing constraints.
However, experts say that developing separate measles, mumps and rubella shots and getting them approved in the U.S. may take years.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Merck’s monovalent measles shots went through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval process. That means that Merck would likely have to start from scratch to get a monovalent measles shot approved, according to Jablonowski.
“That may take several years and a lot of effort by Merck,” he said.
Jablonowski added that Merck, as the U.S. market leader for MMR vaccines, may not have sufficient incentives to develop separate shots.
Hooker told The Defender today that currently, “the only countries that offer a separate measles vaccine are in Africa and the Middle East.”
“One would think that the most robust public health policy would be to offer a monovalent vaccine as an alternative to the MMR shot for those families who choose to spread out their children’s shots. This change needs to happen,” Hooker said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.