By Michelle A. Williams and Paul Hudson, CEO of Sanofi
When public health authorities approved COVID-19 vaccines in the winter of 2020-21, most of us breathed a sigh of relief. The shots promised to blunt the impact of a deadly pandemic that had already killed millions and disrupted life as we knew it. Access to the vaccines was woefully uneven, with low-and middle-income countries experiencing long delays. But even where they were widely available, many people chose not to take them, causing mortality rates in several countries — first and foremost, the U.S. — to remain too high for too long.
It’s clear that medical interventions and public health strategies only work if the public trusts the institutions that develop or promote them. Unfortunately, new data from a poll commissioned by Sanofi found that institutional trust is at low levels worldwide, severely hindering our ability to prevent and respond to future global health crises.
A survey of more than 11,500 people in the U.S., the U.K., France, Japan, and Brazil found that only 35% of respondents trusted health care information from the government. In addition, only 34% trusted health care information from the mainstream media, while fewer than 1 in 4 trusted health care information from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social media.
Public institutions, including public health agencies, undoubtedly have a lot of work to do to rebuild trust.
But the news is not all grim: The survey’s country-specific findings give reason for hope, as they show that certain institutions have been able to retain trust in certain countries.
Consider the media: In Brazil, 50% of those surveyed said they trusted news organizations. That’s not outstanding, but it’s still far better than in any other country. (In the U.K., for instance, just 29% trusted the media, the figure is 32% in the U.S.)
Trust in government is more tenuous across the board, but there are still variations. According to the study, 41% of respondents in France trust health care information from their government and another 29% were neutral, meaning just 28% regard their government with total distrust. That’s better than in the U.S., where 44% express blanket distrust of the government.
As for the education system, trust in teachers was at its highest in Brazil, at 83%. By contrast, just 39% of respondents in Japan expressed trust in teachers.
These findings suggest that we need to dig deeper and see if we can draw lessons from institutions that have retained trust in certain nations to be applied elsewhere in the world.
Interestingly, there was one consistent bright spot across the globe: The study found that 70% of all respondents trusted health care information from friends and family. Again, more research is needed, but these findings suggest that leveraging these unofficial social networks of friends and family to share validated health information could be a promising path to reach people skeptical of institutional channels.
As we wrote earlier this year, women, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ are much more likely to have had bad experiences that eroded their trust in their doctors and the health care system as a whole. We clearly need to build back trust in providers and health care institutions. But we also need to be creative in using hyper-local, community messengers to convey credible health care information when we can.
We often say that we need to meet people where they are. It’s time to follow through.
