U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- Americans’ trust in the federal government has been in a decades-long decline. According to Pew Research polling data, in 1964 77 percent of Americans reported that they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” In April 2021, less than a quarter of Americans shared that trust.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s confused performance during the COVID-19 pandemic won’t do anything to buck that trend.
Recent research conducted by the RAND Corporation showed that “Public trust in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fallen during the coronavirus pandemic.” The think tank noted, “Surveys done among a representative group of Americans in May and October of 2020 show about a 10% decline in trust of the CDC over that period.” Moreover, “Declines in trust in the CDC were widely observed across groups,” including among those who intended to vote for Joe Biden.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that confidence in the CDC dropped 16 percent from April 2020 to September 2020. Again, this drop was observed across the political spectrum, including a 12 percent decrease in trust among Democrats.
Polling conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in early 2021 came to a similar finding, but one that also suggests the reasons for declining trust in public health officials extends beyond their response to COVID-19. The group explained, “The public’s rating of the nation’s public health system… [has] changed over time, with positive ratings of the public health system declining from 43% to 34% from 2009 to 2021.” Over that same time period, the CDC’s job performance rating also dropped significantly.
It is notable that this decrease in public esteem, in addition to occurring in part during the COVID-19 era, corresponded with the public health field’s expanding foray into a host of non-health-related and politically-charged topics. The introduction to the Harvard study acknowledged,
In the United States, over the past several decades, the field of public health has moved away from focusing on infectious disease control and now encompasses a much wider range of issues such as the environment and climate change, injury prevention, racism, healthy housing, and reducing drug and alcohol abuse.
Call it mission creep, the bureaucratic imperative, greed, or a function of ideology, but it is clear that the CDC and public health officials are seeking to exert control over a greater number of people in a larger and increasingly tenuous array of circumstances.
Further, it is hard to escape the notion that this is a partisan project. A 2018 survey of members of the Society for Epidemiologic Research, which bills itself as “the oldest and largest organization of epidemiologists,” found that nearly three-quarters identify as “liberal/left-leaning.” A mere 4.4 percent identify as “conservative/right-leaning.”
There is some evidence to suggest that CDC and public health officials’ political games are part of what’s diminishing public trust. In the Kaiser survey, 42 percent of respondents reported that the CDC pays too much attention to politics “when reviewing and approving treatments for coronavirus/issuing guidelines and recommendations related to coronavirus…” The Rand study concluded that the problem is severe enough that the CDC should take active steps to “rebuild trust and depoliticize” its image.
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