People in the U.S. Trusting Doctors Less Is What Happens When Pandemics Are Politicized

While there has been much written about the U.S. presidential elections as of late, I want to turn our attention to a different topic. According to a 50-state survey recently published in the medical journal JAMA Network, trust in physicians and doctors dropped from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024. That is a 43.9 percent decrease in about four years (Perlis et al., 2024). The survey sample size of 443,455 respondents makes the findings of this research paper even more shocking. 

When respondents were asked why there was low trust, the main responses were financial motives over health care, poor quality of care and negligence, influence of external entities and agendas, and discrimination and bias. As was stated in the abstract of the research paper:

"Trust in physicians and hospitals has been associated with achieving public health goals, but the increasing politicization of public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic may have adversely affected such trust." 

I do not think that is a "maybe." Politicization of the pandemic most certainly played a role. I was already worried that the pandemic began during the election cycle, especially when it entailed the potential reelection of a president as polarizing as Donald Trump. It only got worse from there.

Stay at home" was a popular mantra. That was later proceeded by "follow the science," even though the "Follow the Science" crowd was doing nothing of the sort. Public health officials embraced positions that were at odds with scientific evidence, some of which included the following: 

• They were ignoring the pandemic guidance that prominent health authorities released shortly before the COVID pandemic saying that lockdowns would be ineffective while causing considerable harm. 
• The government pushed the six-foot social distancing rule, although Fauci admitted earlier this year that it was not based on science and probably made up.
• School closures were implemented in many schools throughout the United States even though it was obvious in Europe as early as summer 2020 that they were unnecessary. 
• Public health officials have been unable to acknowledge the importance of natural immunity, the high costs of lockdowns that by far outweighed the benefits, or the fact that face masks did nothing of statistical significance to prevent COVID transmission.

While the aforementioned examples pertain more to public health officials and politicians, the sad truth is that such irresponsibility with touting "Follow the science" had a spillover effect on doctors and hospitals. In March 2024, I highlighted how COVID vaccine mandates caused people to be more skeptical of all vaccines. Some of the unintended consequences of the vaccine mandates included erosion of key principles in public health principles and erosion of trust in regulatory oversight. 

There was a certain reactance that became more potent as it became more obvious that what the public health and medical authorities were recommending was not based in science. I remember going to doctor's offices in 2022 and 2023 that would make you wear face masks or would have single-use pens, even though it was proven by Spring 2020 that surface transmission was not a prominent form of COVID transmission. 

I cannot say that I am surprised that more people are less willing to trust doctors. When doctors are peddling the anti-science bullocks that public health officials are erroneously peddling, then you get sick of it after a while. It can be easy to build trust. However, once trust is destroyed or harmed, it is difficult to rebuild. Regrettably, that is what the medical profession faces. 

I will concede that there were other reasons prior to the pandemic as to why people did not trust doctors. Ballooning health care costs, a less personalized experience due to less time spent with patients, greater availability of medical information, a lack of transparency and communication, and burnout in the profession all attributed to the mistrust pre-pandemic. But make no mistake: politicizing healthcare during the pandemic made matters worse. 

To quote the World Economic Forum, "Health workers are increasingly disillusioned by the politicization of health, exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. This skepticism hampers the prospects for meaningful reform and transformative progress within our health systems." The health workers are increasingly disillusioned, as are the patients. It will take time to rebuild that trust. I simply hope that the trust could be rebuilt well before the next pandemic so that people do not have to needlessly die.