On virus, Americans still trust the experts
Across partisan divide, majorities believe in science
For months, President Donald Trump has been contradicting his public health advisers over the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Over that same time, public health messages about the virus have been shifting. Advice that masks weren’t necessary changed to advice to wear masks. Guidance against mass gatherings was softened in the face of a recent wave of political protests.
Social media fights and news coverage have tended to focus on the masklessand-angry; on large, risky public gatherings; and on harassment of public health officials.
But a New York Times/ Siena College survey shows a large majority of American registered voters quietly trust the advice of medical experts.
“I think there’s too much pessimism about American trust in science,” said Elizabeth Suhay, an associate professor of government at American University.
The poll shows that large majorities across the partisan divide trust medical scientists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though Democrats are more trusting than Republicans overall. The levels are similar to those found in public opinion surveys earlier in the pandemic, and in the years before it, suggesting that the politicization of the coronavirus response has not demolished the credibility of science.
In the Times survey, 84 percent of voters said they trusted medical scientists to provide reliable information about the virus, with 90 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans trusting the experts. Overall trust in the CDC was 77 percent — 71 percent among Republicans and 83 percent among Democrats.
Jonathon Ferguson, a real estate agent in Central Michigan and selfdescribed conservative, says he has conservative friends who have resisted public health measures as infringements of their rights.
But he has largely supported the actions of his governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who imposed control measures over the objections of the president.
“When you have something that is so out of the box — a new global pandemic — it’s kind of like, ‘Let’s get ahold of this and see where we are at,’ ” said Ferguson, 39. “Our rights aren’t going anywhere.”
Even as trust in government and many professionals has been declining for decades, Americans’ trust in medical experts has tended to remain high. Gallup has shown consistently high rankings for nurses, doctors and pharmacists on measures of “honesty and ethics.”
The Pew Research Center has seen consistently high scores for medical experts. Its most recent study, from May, showed 89 percent of Americans were confident that medical experts were acting “in the public interest.”
“We’re looking at a long-term decline in trust in institutions, including elected officials particularly, as well as the media,” said Cary Funk, who has led the Pew team. “This stands in contrast to that.”
But as people have chafed under the constraints of stay-at-home orders, and as coronavirus case numbers have started rising again, that stated trust in experts may face a new test.
Some political scientists worry that, given the political overtones to the virus response and months of confusing or conflicting advice from experts, it may be hard to mobilize the public to follow public health guidelines in the way they did in the early months of the outbreak.
Evidence shows that trust is a good predictor of behavior — people who trust medical experts are more likely to heed their advice. That helps explain the widespread compliance with advice to shut down businesses and stay home this spring, and with other policies devised to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
But research also shows two key factors tend to dilute trust in public health: political polarization and mixed messages. Both are present in this crisis. Sarah Gollust, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who studies the communication of health policy, worries that the current levels of public trust may begin to erode.
“The trends started out bad and are remaining bad,” she said.
Pew research has shown that people who rely on the White House for information on the virus tend to think the disease and pandemic are less dangerous than people who get their news from the national or local news media.