Covid pandemic has eroded Americans’ trust in experts and elected leaders alike -- survey

The pandemic has eroded Americans’ trust in experts and elected leaders alike, a survey finds.

As the coronavirus pandemic entered its third year, the American public had lost much of its trust both in public health experts and in government leaders, and was less worried than before about Covid-19, according to a survey conducted in early May and released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

Confidence ratings for public health officials, like those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; for state and local elected officials; and for President Biden fell in a range from 43 percent to 54 percent in the survey — much lower than during the early stages of the pandemic.

The survey found a wide partisan gap in attitudes. Overall, 52 percent of respondents said that public health officials had done an excellent or good job at managing the pandemic. But while 72 percent of Democrats in the survey said they felt that way, only 29 percent of Republicans did.

Democrats were also more likely than Republicans — 67 percent to 51 percent —  to say they had at least some confidence in how prepared the nation’s health care system was to address a future global health emergency.

Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Stanford Medicine who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases, said the pandemic only widened the country’s partisan divide over those issues.

“I think that mistrust in government and politicians, and even to a certain extent science, started well before the pandemic, and it just was exacerbated,” Dr. Maldonado said.

Pandemic fatigue and a growing notion that Covid is now a part of everyday life probably played a role in the changing public attitudes identified in the Pew survey, according to Dr. Robert Wachter, a professor and the chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco.

“I think people’s thinking is very much influenced by the fact that the chances you’re going to die of Covid have gone down substantially on a per-case basis,” Dr. Wachter said. ...