Why don’t people trust science?

Early in the pandemic, concerned friends and family members turned to Jennifer Dixon for all their COVID-19 questions: Should I clean up the groceries? Are parcels from China dangerous?

But a few months later, Dixon, an infection prevention specialist for nearly two decades at WakeMed, noticed a change. Some of her neighbors and friends who have texted her and called her for advice have suddenly been deeply suspicious of her intentions and qualifications.

“Those same people are the ones who look at me now and say, ‘I don’t believe you anymore,'” she said.

Some acquaintances deleted her from Facebook when she posted masks. Neighbors confronted her after seeing her talk about the vaccine on TV. Her closest friends stopped talking to him.

“The detractors have become stronger detractors and people who were on the fence have fallen one way or the other,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been both a lesson in how scientific research can be used to save lives and the extent to which public trust in scientific institutions has been lost.

Scientists who had devoted their lives to researching coronaviruses were suddenly subjected to harassment and conspiracy theories. Large sections of the population have rejected a vaccine that could save lives.

In the past two years alone, the percentage of Americans who have “a lot of trust in scientists to act in the public interest” has dropped 10 percentage points to just 29%, according to a Pew poll.

Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease expert at Duke, has come under particularly virulent mistrust over the past two years.

He received letters with “outright threats” and nasty comments on social media. Conspiracy theorists have claimed online that Wolfe injected HIV into vaccines and that her children died after participating in clinical trials of the vaccine.

Wolfe has no problem questioning science. He believes that the critique of methodologies and the evaluation of data is a fundamental part of the scientific process. But to Wolfe it didn’t seem like his critics were pushing for better COVID-19 research, but rather he seemed to be rejecting the entire scientific process with surprising aggressiveness.

“I’ve never seen it come from an inherently skeptical place, almost like it’s the structure that a lot of people sit on,” she said.

While the pandemic has exacerbated mistrust in scientists, trust in research has been slowly eroding for decades.

Another Gallup poll found that trust in science has declined since the 1970s, especially among Republicans.

“The crisis of confidence in our society did not start with COVID-19 and will not end with COVID-19,” reads an article from the Association of American Medical Colleges. “The pandemic has provided a fertile environment for a myriad of social and technological forces that have bred confusion and distrust.”

Scientists fear that rampant misinformation and dwindling trust in scientific institutions are making it harder to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as climate change, pandemics and social inequality.