The erosion of public trust: When evolving science clashes with political messaging

“ Health care is a right, not a privilege – and I will do everything in my power to ensure that all Americans have access to the quality, affordable health care they deserve. That is especially critical in the midst of a deadly pandemic that has already taken the lives of more than 470,000 of our fellow Americans and infected more than one out of every 12 additional Americans, often with devastating consequences to their health. ”

“ The pandemic has both reinforced the importance of that duty and tested our capacity to meet it — the virus has exacerbated the quiet harm of social isolation among seniors around the world, a condition that makes abuse, neglect, and exploitation more likely. Having lost so many cherished seniors to this virus, we must recommit ourselves to fully including older Americans in our communities and systems of support. We must care for one another — and leave no one behind. ”

“ Contradictory messages from political and scientific leadership can greatly undermine the public’s trust and generate misinformation.
Shifting guidelines on mask use demonstrate the challenges of managing unknowns and the importance of upholding the “be right” principle.39 At the outset of the pandemic, WHO and US public health authorities advised the public not to wear masks, despite limited evidence on their potential benefit or detriment to disease control.40 On February 29, 2020, US Surgeon General Dr. ”

“ A failure of administrative and public health leadership to be consistent and unified in their messaging undermines credibility, with potentially catastrophic consequences for public health and public trust—particularly as we roll out vaccines and states and localities face increasing pressures to reopen. ”

“ But the inevitability with which all statements bearing on public health are in these days bruited abroad and the avidity with which they are received make it incumbent more than ever on those who speak with authority on such subjects to observe caution and discretion, for doubts or speculations that would be harmless or even stimulating when addressed to a critical and well-informed audience, may become confusing or misleading when, having passed through the alembic of the journalistic mind, they appeal to the general. ”

“ In many quarters the attitude of the public toward the medical profession is one of misunderstanding, distrust and antagonism. Fads and sects, like homeopathy, osteopathy and christian science, have a large and influential following, including the most intelligent and respectable members of the community. ”

“ EPA, supra note 29, 541 F.2d at 24-25, we pointed out: Questions involving the environment are particularly prone to uncertainty. Technological man has altered his world in ways never before experienced or anticipated. The health effects of such alterations are often unknown, sometimes unknowable. While a concerned Congress has passed legislation providing for protection of the public health against gross environmental modifications, the regulators entrusted with the enforcement of such laws have not thereby been endowed with a prescience that removes all doubt from their decisionmaking. ”

“ A novel pathogen presents a complex, dynamic situation for public health officials and health communicators. Information shared one day may be completely reversed the next as more evidence emerges; guidance can quickly become obsolete. The public can often be forgiving of perceived errors from authority figures. Maintaining credibility is driven heavily by not only being at the forefront and being correct, but also being honest and transparent, even when sharing difficult information. ”

“ It has become quite a matter of course to expect revolutionizing discoveries, and science is at heart disposed to readjustment and revision. This attitude has taken hold of the general social mind through the popularization of science, and society at large has acquired a faith in a mobile, growing body of truth. ”

“ It has happened many times in the history of science, one need but think of the changes in the treatment of disease that first one cause, then another then a third has been assigned the leading role in the drama of causation, but each of these in turn has had his vizor torn off, and has stood exposed as a condition which, masquerading under the armor of special privilege, for a time succeeded in imposing on the public as a real cause. ”

“ Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases; we have done more, we have increased their mortality. I will not pause to beg pardon of the faculty for acknowledging, in this public manner, the weakness of our profession. I am pursuing Truth, and am indifferent whither I am led, if she only is my leader." ↑ Quoth Dr. Black. ”

“ It is of great importance that the mind of the lay public should be disabused of the idea that medical science is possessed of final information concerning questions of nutrition. This is very far indeed from being the case. Human nutrition involves highly com [Pg 24] plex factors, and the scientific basis for our knowledge of the subject is but small; where questions of diet are concerned, medical teaching, no less than popular practice, is to a great extent based upon empiricism. ”

“ Your position is rather a peculiar one, for although you work for the benefit of the public, it is not to be expected that the public can understand all you say when your speech is of science in consultation with each other. The public will therefore, I trust, be in the position of those who are willing to pay their physicians when they meet in consultation, without insisting that every word the doctors say to each other shall be repeated in the hearing of all men. ”

“ But quitting the dim light of historical research, attaching ourselves purely to the dictates of reason and good sense, we shall discover much greater cause to reject than to approve the idea of plurality in the Executive, under any modification whatever.
Wherever two or more persons are engaged in any common enterprise or pursuit, there is always danger of difference of opinion. If it be a public trust or office, in which they are clothed with equal dignity and authority, there is peculiar danger of personal emulation and even animosity. ”

“ Though we celebrate the news of the third vaccine, I urge all Americans: Please keep washing your hands, stay socially distanced, wear masks — keep wearing them, get vaccinated when it’s your turn. Now is not the time to let up. I’ve asked the country to wear masks for my first 100 days in office. Now is not the time to let our guard down. People’s lives are at stake. ”

“ And let me close by saying, as all of our experts have said many times, while the threat of serious illness to the average American from the coronavirus remains low, every American can do your part to reduce the burden on your health, on your family, the burden on our healthcare system and especially the threat to the most vulnerable among us by putting into practice the President's "15 Days to Slow the Spread." ”

“ First, trust and community confidence are cornerstones of our national vaccine efforts. Trusted voices are critical to building confidence in vaccines and addressing misinformation. Our community leaders are often those trusted voices.
We heard from national, state, and local health leaders about communication and public education campaigns they are deploying to combat myths and disinformation, and instill confidence and interest in COVID-19 vaccines, as well as tools and strategies healthcare providers can use when talking with their patients about COVID-19 vaccination. ”

“ The Federal Government must take swift action to reduce the risk that workers may contract COVID–19 in the workplace. That will require issuing science-based guidance to help keep workers safe from COVID–19 exposure, including with respect to mask-wearing; partnering with State and local governments to better protect public employees; enforcing worker health and safety requirements; and pushing for additional resources to help employers protect employees. ”

“ In this age of general doubt, when human reason is exalted above divine testimony, and the voice of faith is drowned by the clamors of pretended science, the possibility and use of a resuscitation of the body are scouted and denied. ”

“ There are no physical laws; all law is Mind; matter is not a law-giver, and cannot be a law. The best interpreter of man's needs said, “Take no thought for the body, what ye shall eat or what drink.”
Putting on the full armor of physiology, obeying to the letter the so-called laws of health, statistics show, has neither diminished sickness nor increased longevity. Diseases have multiplied and become more obstinate, their chronic forms more frequent, the acute more fatal, and death more sudden, since our man-made theories have taken the place of primitive Truth. ”

“ The contest between error and Truth whereby all 'isms will finally disappear, and the age pass into science, has been going on with pen and tongue for centuries, and yet, sin, sickness and death abound, because science that called the battle has been suffocated with opinions and theories. We boast of material law, but find it fails to save from sickness, sin and death ”

“ Reverse this belief and the results would be different." "We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have small-pox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection." "A Christian Scientist never gives medicine, never recommends hygiene, never manipulates." "Anatomy, Physiology, Treatises on Health, sustained by what is termed material law, are the husbandmen of sickness and disease." "You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will take cold without his blanket." ”

“ Yet so much good is often thus effected that people are disposed to welcome these ignoramuses as prophets of wisdom and abide by their advice rather than seek counsel of legitimate educated conservators of health. Nevertheless, the fad of physical culture is distinctly to be welcomed with all its present limitations and even its perils. ”

“ The public fails to believe in the urgency of health needs, when presented by individuals or groups of physicians, because of its inability to appreciate the motive which leads the physician to urge the establishment of machinery and the special education of officials, as also the provision of funds to carry on work which to the casual observer would mean a diminution of the individual physician's work and income. ”

“ ASSISTANT SURGEON, UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
THE wide-spread ignorance of the various means employed by the federal government to promote the well-being of its citizens is nowhere better exemplified than in the common ignorance of the functions and important work of the Public Health Service. This ignorance is the more lamentable inasmuch as the Public Health Service is the sole national agency operating to combat and prevent epidemic diseases among human beings, and to improve public sanitation and hygiene, in the United States. ”

“ The fact that much of the dissipation and the disregard of health laws is due to ignorance rather than to want of thought is sufficient reason for the study of health laws. But, as the health of individuals is closely related to the health of the village, town, or city in which they live, and as "public health is public wealth," another reason is apparent for the popular study of hygiene. ”

“ The same thing is true with regard to the spread of the acute contagia, the burden of venereal disease, the obscure ill effects of defective eyes and ears and teeth, and a dozen other problems which in greater or less degree concern the public health. In every one of these cases the results we are striving for can only be reached by spreading a clear knowledge of the ways in which disease spreads, and the ways in which it is prevented, among the mothers who bring up babies and the men who pay rent in the tenement and work in the stores and factories. ”

“ And how easily in many of these matters public opinion is swayed by mere catch-words no judicious student of public affairs can help being aware. As regards the treatment of our bodily ills, we have—at least intelligent people have—got to the point of distrusting the quacks who undertake to drive away every specific ailment by an equally specific nostrum; and we give our confidence rather to those who study the general conditions on which health depends, and who place their own chief reliance on the curative force of Nature. ”

“ In other words, science has to take hold of education and remodel it, until it gives us a generation of citizens too intelligent and with too practiced a sense for truth to fall the easy prey that so many thousands now do to the arts of the political trickster. ”

“ Since scurvy and rickets by improper food, and gout, rheumatism and Bright's disease brought on by unbalanced indulgence, might both pass on a taint to the offspring, education in hygiene assumes special importance. Our recent pure food legislation, furthermore, is an indication of what enlightened public opinion can do to protect the careless and the ignorant against the evils of malnutrition and improper feeding. ”

“ By definition, our science studies the laws of health and the functions of the healthy body, therefore, it is ours to lead in the quest for health. Is this object best achieved if we confine ourselves to research in our laboratories, and to the teaching of the principles of physiology to medical students, while we leave the community as a whole uninstructed as to the objects of our research and its value to every man, and trust the medical students whom we turn out to communicate, or not communicate as they choose, the results of their training and our research to the world at large? ”

“ It thus frequently happens that the man of science is consulted on all matters of a scientific nature, and he is induced to give opinions on subjects only remotely, if at all, related to that branch of science in which he is justly recognized as an authority. Although going well for a time, these opinions often prove to be erroneous in the end, resulting in a diminution of that confidence which the public is, on the whole, inclined to place in the dictum of science. ”