A grateful public called doctors health care heroes and collected personal protective equipment and pizzas for them during the early, deadliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But nearly four years later, public trust in physicians and hospitals plummeted, going from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024, according to a 50-state survey of U.S. adults led by Northeastern University’s distinguished professor of political science and computer sciences.
“It is obviously a very, very sizable decline,” says David Lazer, whose research was published in JAMA Open Access, a peer-reviewed medical journal. And it’s one with public health repercussions, since individuals with lower levels of trust were less likely to get vaccinated against COVID or seasonal influenza, he says. “It is striking that we saw distrust predicted future vaccination status,” Lazer says. “While we can’t be sure that this is a causal relationship, it is consistent with the possibility that distrust is a factor in lower vaccination rates.”
