![]() Science leaders in government and academia say that meeting the challenge to regain credibility requires a deeper understanding of several conditions: Moving forward, scientists working on high-visibility health projects are more likely than ever to find themselves operating within an infodemic: an overload of information about a problem, much of it wrong, that makes it harder to solve the problem. ![]() “Now we have whole groups of people who don’t believe that.” “The whole strength of science is that people who have different ideological bents can do experiments, transcend their prior beliefs, and try to build a foundation of facts,” says Janet Woodcock, MD, principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “Trust in scientific institutions has taken a huge hit,” says Timothy Caulfield, LLM, research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, Canada. Those forces ignite epidemics of misinformation against pillars of society: among them our systems of justice, education, science, and democracy. Rather, the pandemic provided a fertile environment for myriad social and technological forces to breed confusion and distrust. “It’s not just a COVID thing,” warns Steven Joffe, MD, MPH, interim chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. It’s not about a disease, it’s not about Twitter, it’s not about facts alone. It’s emerging from the darkest days of the pandemic with both lifesaving discoveries and a crisis in credibility.Īlthough confusion and hostility are defining features of the past two years of COVID-19, the crisis of trust in our society didn’t start with COVID-19 and won’t end with COVID-19. Medical science is creating miracles and losing trust. Subsequent articles addressed whether the iterative nature of scientific discovery is at least partly to blame, why so many people believe medical misinformation, and whether people can be immunized against disinformation. Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles about trust in science. ![]()
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