When health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about the chronic disease epidemic ravaging America’s young, I am one of the people he is speaking about. At 34 years old, I am overweight and already suffering from high cholesterol and high blood pressure. I have ADHD so bad I often forget to brush my teeth in the morning. And when a doctor — who I waited several months to see in hopes he’d figure out why I’m incessantly tired — recently asked what conditions my very high dose of an SSRI was treating, my response was simply “all of the above.”
I tell you all of this as STAT’s inaugural reporter on trust in science, because I know what it means to be searching for an explanation to what ails you, and a way to fix it. I also know all too well how frustrating it is to realize that modern medicine does not have all the answers. On bad days, when I’m especially anxious or I step on the scale after a good week of dieting to see no results, Kennedy’s claim that America’s medical system has turned into “a sick care system” that rewards doctors, hospitals, and drug companies resonates more than I’d like to admit. At my most desperate, I’ve tried the keto diet, injected a compounded peptide, and taken fistfuls of dietary supplements. It’s this worldview that will inform my work in this new role.
Far too much coverage of declining trust in science is predicated on the assumption that skeptics are just a small minority of ill-informed people. After all, surveys consistently show that the majority do believe scientists act in the public’s interest. But we may be asking the wrong question. The more illuminating question isn’t whether people trust scientists, but rather what happens when scientific knowledge collides with emotions like fear, confusion, and frustration.
Declining trust in science is often associated with distrust in vaccines, but this topic touches everything we cover at STAT. Nearly every decision made during the Covid-19 pandemic was a referendum on public trust. So, too, are the debates over public health measures like supervised injection sites and water fluoridation. Staples of modern medicine like antidepressants and statins are now being questioned. Even pasteurization — a widely accepted public health practice for more than a century — is up for debate. (More than a quarter of people in a recent survey said raw milk is healthier than pasteurized, and another quarter didn’t know the answer.)
Take my own experimentation with dietary supplements: I turned to NAC, a supplement that people typically take to boost their immune system and improve liver health, in a bout of desperation after I realized the second drug I was trying for my obsessive-compulsive disorder wasn’t working nearly as well as I had hoped. The idea wasn’t totally bunk — there were some clinical trials showing it might help, by impacting the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain — but when my doctor pointed out holes in the data, I found myself rationalizing a decision to keep taking it. I didn’t doubt the science, or my doctor, but I was scared that I was going to feel this way forever, and I’d do anything to make it stop. I can see how parents, alarmed by rising rates of autism and the lack of scientific consensus on what causes it, would try to avoid anything even rumored to be a cause, including vaccines.
While evidence that vaccines do not cause the various harms claimed by the doubters has only mounted over time, the challenges facing parents have also become more difficult. Activists have become remarkably good at passing off anti-vaccine dogma as legitimate science. I cover science for a living, and often I struggle to debunk studies that claim evidence of various vaccine harms. And I know how to read a research paper. Available data suggest that scientific literacy is at a crisis point: A 2020 study found that only 50% of U.S. adults could identify a scientific hypothesis. If I can’t empathize with these people, I won’t be doing my job.
I understand the temptation to get angry at people who refuse vaccines. One of my first reporting trips for this new beat was to a conference of the organization Kennedy once led, Children’s Health Defense, in Washington on Thursday. At times, I couldn’t believe what was being said, including claims that polio-related paralysis was not caused by polio but by pesticides, and that the flu shot increases risks for Alzheimer’s.
But the memory that will stick with me was the hug I received from a woman who thanked me for listening to the story of the son she claimed was paralyzed shortly after receiving a vaccine. I don’t know the full details of her son’s experience — my gut reaction was that his misfortune was not related to a vaccine — but that doesn’t mean I should dismiss that woman, the pain she clearly felt, and her reasons for losing trust in science. For far too long, we in the media have stayed away from stories like these for fear of stoking unnecessary fear. I’m mindful of that challenge, but I believe we must tell those stories in a responsible way. There are few things I agree with Kennedy on when it comes to vaccines. But I couldn’t agree more when he said last week that even if vaccine injuries “are rare, in our country, we care about rare illnesses and deaths,” and that we should care about those who believe they were injured by vaccines.
The debate over medical products — particularly vaccines — has been shrouded in misinformation. And I will not be reluctant to call that out, even if it means hard conversations with the people I’m covering. If a claim is false, I will point that out — whether it’s coming from the mouth of a suburban mom or the secretary of Health and Human Services. The remit of this role includes investigating and exposing the networks of people who benefit financially and politically from sowing unsubstantiated doubt. (Tips welcome at [email protected].) But understanding the root causes of distrust in science requires an honest examination of why charlatans are so easily able to prey on everyday Americans.
If you’re an avid STAT reader, the idea that we need to understand why people distrust science may not be controversial. But you can have your heart in the right place and still contribute to America’s trust-in-science problem. We need to have conversations about how doctors’ interactions with anti-vaccine parents too frequently polarize those families even more, just as we need to grapple with how pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive profit-seeking makes it easier to paint them as corrupt actors. In this new role, no element of our health care system or research enterprise will be immune from scrutiny because the problem of declining trust in science cannot be solved without earnestly assessing what is working and what isn’t.
While you may not agree with every story I write on this topic, I hope you will find that each one challenges your preconceptions and ultimately brings us one very small step closer to solving this very large problem. I welcome your feedback — positive and especially negative — on every story I write. If you have an idea of how to restore trust, I am all ears.
If you think this issue can simply be ignored and will fizzle away, I urge you to reconsider your convictions, and I remind you that Francis Bond, the founder of the pro-vaccine Jenner Society, predicted in 1902 that the anti-vaccine movement would be “stamped out” in time.
It was reasonable to assume that fears around vaccines would fade 100 years ago. They were relatively new back then. But those fears remain. We as a society have more scientific knowledge at our fingertips than ever before. Scientific experts can share that knowledge not just via peer-reviewed journals but through TikToks, TED Talks, and tweets. But knowledge alone is clearly not enough. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I’m excited by the challenge of trying to figure it out.
STAT’s coverage of trust in science and public health is supported by the Dana Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, and Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.