CDC And FDA Trusted By Only Half Of Americans

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Poll Finds Public Health Has A Trust Problem

“I don’t trust them — I don’t,” says Sandra Wallace. She’s 60 and owns a construction company in Arizona. To her, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance has been inconsistent.

“It’s all over the board,” she says. “They say one thing one minute and then turn around and say another the next minute.”

Wallace was one of the respondents in a poll published Thursday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The survey of 1,305 people was conducted from mid-February to mid-March of this year. The foundation funds coverage of health and health care on NPR.

Overall, the poll found that only 52% of Americans have a great deal of trust in CDC. Other health agencies were even lower — only 37% of Americans said they had a lot of trust in the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration.

“We’re in a period of distrust of government in general,” notes Robert Blendon, emeritus professor at the Harvard Chan School, who oversaw the survey. “If we substituted the FBI for the CDC, it would not do a lot better.”

The poll found that trust isn’t just a problem for federal health agencies. State health departments have the trust of 41% of Americans, and local health departments only did slightly better at 44%.

Trust in public health during a pandemic is incredibly high stakes. Public health measures — like mask wearing and business restrictions — can’t work as intended to contain a pandemic if the community doesn’t believe they’re based on reliable information.

If that trust is not there, people won’t agree “to change their lives, take preventive [measures], take vaccines,” Blendon says.

Read full story here: Source: CDC And FDA Trusted By Only Half Of Americans : NPR


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