Asma Khalil, MD, was 3700 miles from Washington, DC, when her patients at a London hospital began asking questions about a White House press conference.

Days earlier, on September 22, President Donald Trump had stood beside Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and proclaimed that using acetaminophen during pregnancy is associated with a “very increased” risk for autism.

“Don’t take Tylenol,” the president implored.

The news swiftly spread around the globe, prompting frightened moms-to-be to let their pain and fever go untreated. Others arrived at Khalil’s clinic fraught with guilt that they’d harmed their unborn child.

“My first reaction was concern,” said Khalil, a researcher and professor of obstetrics and maternal fetal medicine at St George’s Hospital at the University of London, England. “The claims appeared to be based on a selective interpretation of observational data, rather than a balanced appraisal of the totality of the evidence.”

Khalil set out to provide that appraisal, leading an international team of scientists who — on top of running labs, teaching, seeing patients, and raising families — made time to scour the literature. In January, they published a sweeping review of 43 studies, finding “no clinically important” link between autism and acetaminophen use in pregnancy.

“What prompted us wasn’t politics; it was patients,” Khalil said. “When misinformation circulates, the most powerful response is not rhetoric. It is high-quality methodology.”

Khalil is part of a growing movement of physician-scientists leveraging their resources and expertise to push back against what they view as an unprecedented wave of health misinformation. Some are fast-tracking studies to fact-check federal claims. (Another large study published this month also debunked links between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism.) Others are taking to social media to clarify science for a confused public awash in conflicting advice. Some have hired bodyguards for public appearances. Others are running for office.

“This is a role that scientists are not necessarily comfortable with because they tend to be people who like to stick to their lab and do their work,” said medical historian Howard Markel, MD, PhD, a retired pediatrician and former director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “We are now in a position where we have to be more vociferous.”

Eroding Trust

For decades, US federal health agencies have been internationally revered. Today, that reputation is under strain.

New data from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center shows a double-digit drop in public trust for the CDC, FDA, and National Institutes of Health since 2024. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows fewer than half of Americans trust the CDC even a “fair amount,” and 20% don’t trust it at all. The skepticism cuts across parties, with just 44% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans saying they trust federal health agencies to base decisions on science rather than personal views.

“The CDC has always been the shining star of federal agencies, relatively unscathed by politics, with enormous public trust,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, who has served on dozens of global and federal health policy advisory committees dating back to the AIDS epidemic. “None of that is true now.”

While COVID-era missteps accelerated the slide, its roots date back to 1980 and the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act. Since then, scientists (and the universities they work for) have been permitted to retain ownership of, patent, and profit from their federally funded discoveries. “It used to be that you didn’t cross that line,” Markel said, “but after 1980, everybody wanted to cash in.”

The shift fueled innovation but also fostered a perception of widespread conflicts of interest as academic research became increasingly entangled with private industry. As far back as 2003, in the book Science in the Private Interest, the late Tufts professor and bioethicist Sheldon Krimsky warned that the lure of profits was corrupting the field, while Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton heralded the “Dawn of McScience.” In a 2009 article, former New England Journal of Medicine editor-in-chief Marcia Angell, MD, catalogued a long list of industry-researcher ties, concluding it was “simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published.” (Though Kennedy has invoked this quote to allege journal corruption, Angell has clarified that her critique targeted industry funding models — warning that the administration’s budget cuts will only drive researchers deeper into pharmaceutical dependence.)

In the years since, there have been policy changes and transparency efforts, such as mandatory financial disclosures, aimed at addressing these concerns. But critics say more work needs to be done.

“From the research funding to the drug approval process to the systemic corruption of the medical journals, it has all gotten worse in recent decades,” said Mark Gorton, an electrical engineer turned president of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Institute, an independent think tank formed in 2025 to support the MAHA agenda. “You have had, more or less, a complete regulatory capture of the federal health agencies by corporate interests. Now Secretary Kennedy and other MAHA supporters at various agencies are making a sincere effort to rectify these problems.”

In the name of restoring trust, HHS has in “Year One of MAHA” upended the US Dietary Guidelines, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, called for sweeping revisions to federal vaccine recommendations, unilaterally removed the black box warning on hormone therapy, and advised pregnant women to “tough it out” rather than use the most common pain relief medicine for pregnancy in the world.

Supporters like Gorton see this as a good start to a much-needed public health “reckoning.” Critics say these decisions rely on questionable science, bypass scientific expertise, and endanger patients.

“It’s one thing when you are just a regular person saying these things,” said Markel, the medical historian. “But when you have a government seal on a podium in front of you, that is very different. In terms of a full assault on science like we are seeing now, I can’t think of a time we’ve seen that before.”

Fast-Tracked Studies and Instagram Posts

In June 2025, HHS dismissed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). “The committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas,” Kennedy announced, describing the committee as “plagued” with conflicts of interest affecting “97%” of its members.

From her office at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, Genevieve Kanter, PhD, followed the story with interest.

As an associate professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy studying the economics of regulation, she had concerns about conflicts of interest too. “But I was not seeing numbers like this,” she said.

So like Khalil, she dug deeper into the data, analyzing publicly available disclosure forms and information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The results, published just 4 months later in JAMA, concluded that while ACIP conflicts of interest were quite high in the early 2000s, present among 43% of members, they had dropped to 6.2% since, likely due to increased awareness and regulatory changes. Fewer than 1% involved personal income.

“If the main justification for terminating these appointments was that the committee was rife with conflicts of interest, this does not appear to be the case,” said Kanter, a self-described “nerdy economist” who has never had much interest in politics. “I certainly didn’t think we would ever have to fact-check the secretary of HHS. But here we are.”

Pauline Maki, PhD, a professor of psychiatry, psychology, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, said that over her decades-long career as a menopause researcher, she has felt that her job was to generate knowledge and let journal editors and scientific associations do the disseminating. As social influencers took hold of the menopause zeitgeist, billing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as an “antiaging miracle” and glossing over real risks, her Instagram account sat idle.

That changed in November, when HHS announced it was removing the black box warning from hormone therapy. Maki generally welcomed the news.

“I’m happy that women aren’t being falsely alarmed about using a medication that really can benefit their well-being,” she said. “But the announcement was full of misinformation.”

So the next day, she sat on her couch, pointed her phone at herself, and started recording. She talked for 4 minutes. Her teenage daughter taught her how to post the video, her first-ever on Instagram.

Maki was particularly alarmed by a statement in the news release that HRT can reduce Alzheimer’s disease risk by 35%. This is false, she said in her video. She should know. She used to believe it and, through her own studies, proved herself wrong. In fact, the latest data points to either a neutral effect or a slight increase in Alzheimer’s disease risk among HRT users.

Within hours, her post had 140,000 views. “I’ve probably helped more women in my few Instagram posts than I have in all of my publications,” Maki said.

‘Data Rescuers’ and Alternative Infrastructures

When rumors began circulating in early 2025 that the CDC was going to remove webpages in response to an executive order related to gender identity, public health researchers from around the world toiled through the night to download and back up pages and datasets on everything from cancer and obesity, to maternal health, HIV, and birth control.

About 8000 federal webpages and more than 2300 datasets vanished that month. Many were later restored, in some cases because of legal challenges.

But today, as concern about lost data persists, an army of — as they call themselves — “data rescuers” has emerged.

“America’s public data is part of our country’s critical infrastructure,” said Joel Gurin, founder of the Center for Open Data Enterprise, which recently published a report on threats to health data, and efforts to preserve it. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Some have joined forces to create alternative public health infrastructures. In February, the American Academy of Pediatrics broke from recent CDC changes to issue its own immunization schedule. In March, autism researchers launched an independent committee following controversial federal appointments. Thirty-one states have enacted measures to strengthen Covid vaccine access and infrastructure in response to shifting federal vaccine recommendations. And several states, including California, Illinois, Colorado, and New York, independently joined the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network to bypass the federal withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

“You are seeing, for the very first time, medical organizations and professional organizations and states putting out recommendations at odds with the federal government,” Gostin said.

He has also been hard at work. In the last year, he has collaborated with scientists to publish papers and op-eds in major medical journals scrutinizing the process and scientific integrity of everything from the CDC’s new vaccine recommendations to the US break-up with the World Health Organization to the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

His analysis is not always critical. “There are certain things Kennedy is right about,” he said, pointing to MAHA’s emphasis on avoiding ultraprocessed foods, eating healthy and exercising, and eliminating toxic petrochemicals and microplastics from the food and water supply.

He also acknowledges that sometimes science gets it wrong — like early in the pandemic when the CDC advised people to stand 6 ft apart to avoid transmission. (Scientists later learned that the virus was airborne and could spread much farther in a poorly ventilated room.) “Science isn’t perfect, and it is iterative,” Gostin said.

Gorton, of the MAHA Institute, said he still believes science is “great and noble.” But money has corrupted it and marginalized those with independent viewpoints. “Unfortunately, our current version of science is mostly corrupt,” he said.

But for discovering the truth, many believe it’s still the best we’ve got.

The courts are beginning to weigh in. On March 16, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked HHS from carrying out many of its proposed changes to the vaccine schedule. The judge noted that the vaccine committee has historically made decisions through “a method scientific in nature…but unfortunately the government has disregarded those methods.”

As trust in federal agencies and universities declines, three quarters of US adults still trust scientists to act in the public interest, according to a January 2026 Pew Research poll.

“If scientists are not going to stand up for what’s true,” Gostin said, “who will?”

This article is part of an ongoing, year-long Medscape series examining the decline of public trust in medicine. More content is available here.