“Trust in Physicians and Hospitals Plummeted Since the COVID Pandemic”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was a pandemic influencer who rose to power spreading both disinformation about COVID and rage about anyone who tried to contain it. In his telling, public health officials and doctors weren’t trying their best to stop a new virus from overwhelming hospitals and morgues. Rather, they were liars, part of a “COVID cartel” and “biomedical security state”. He and other MAHA doctors made these sorts of allegations and accusations all the time, for years. I’ve documented it all in thick books.
However, Dr. Bhattacharya was very good at spreading doubt, a true grandmaster. His podcasts were very effective, and his mission to lower trust in science and medicine succeeded. According to as article titled Trust in Physicians and Hospitals Plummeted Since the COVID Pandemic, Northeastern Research Says:
A grateful public called doctors health care heroes and collected personal protective equipment and pizzas for them during the early, deadliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But nearly four years later, public trust in physicians and hospitals plummeted, going from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024, according to a 50-state survey of U.S. adults led by Northeastern University’s distinguished professor of political science and computer sciences.
This didn’t happen on its own. A lot of people worked very hard and deliberately to accomplish this.
“I just want to make sure people understand that I don’t want the public health authorities to be discredited permanently.”
Since gaining power, however, Dr. Bhattacharya has often stated his goal is to fix the problem he created. In one typical interview, he said:
I just want to make sure people understand that I don’t want the public health authorities to be discredited permanently. I want reform of the public health authorities so that they become worthy of trust.
Now that he’s in charge, Dr. Bhattacharya feels we can start trusting public health authorities once again. In his view that problem was temporary. However, he is discovering that trust is not like a light switch that he can turn on and off based on his command alone.
“Americans Trust Fauci Over RFK Jr. and Career Scientists Over Trump Officials.”
Dr. Bhattacharya has been in office for nearly a year, first at the NIH and then also at the CDC, we can evaluate his performance thus far. Have public health authorities, especially the leaders of MAHA, again become widely trusted with Dr. Bhattacharya leading the way?
It doesn’t seem that way.
MAHA doctors have learned the hard way that it’s much easier to break trust than to rebuild it. From censorship to cancelled research, Americans recognize the obvious incompetence and malevolence of the entire MAHA project. With Dr. Bhattacharya in power, the headlines now read Americans Trust Fauci Over RFK Jr. and Career Scientists Over Trump Officials.
Doctors and scientists don’t trust Dr. Bhattacharya either. Shiv Prasad, a scientific review officer at NIH summed up the general sentiment by saying:
The NIH director position has always been a full-time job for everyone who’s held that position, and no one has treated it as a part-time job before. It’s unfortunate that he spends a significant amount of time either on rightwing podcasts or addressing rightwing conventions and maybe finds time for NIH in between those appearances.
Major medical organizations are wisely ignoring his decimation of the vaccine schedule, and according to a data compiled by KFF, “30 states, including DC, have announced that they are no longer going to follow CDC’s recommendations for some or all childhood vaccines.” As the Lancet said in their article: Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 Year of Failure:
Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation and push politicised agendas at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable. When called to account for his decisions by Congress, he has been evasive and combative. The destruction that Kennedy has wrought in 1 year might take generations to repair, and there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm. Calls for his resignation now number in the thousands.
So much for restoring trust.
Even Dr. Bhattacharya’s defenders, if they exist, can’t make the affirmative case that the NIH and CDC are more trusted now than before he and MAHA took over.
“We are now joyous that a public health official actually recommended the measles vaccine during a measles outbreak greater than anything we’ve seen in more than 30 years—ecstatic that a public health official finally stated the obvious.”
However, Dr. Bhattacharya has an actual job to do today. He is fully responsible for many things right now. In a cruel twist of fate, the man who rose to power trying to spread COVID is responsible for limiting measles today. Every outbreak and sick child is happening under his watch.
And presto! Dr. Bhattacharya suddenly expects the public to trust doctors, public health officials, and vaccines, literally everyone and everything he spent the past 6 years attacking. “Trust is the foundation of public health earned by openness, honesty and guidance to the best available evidence,” he said in a recent video, where he actually recommended the MMR, the only way to stop measles.
Writing about this video and the soft bigotry of low expectations, Dr. Paul Offit said:
We are now joyous that a public health official actually recommended the measles vaccine during a measles outbreak greater than anything we’ve seen in more than 30 years—ecstatic that a public health official finally stated the obvious. It’s hard to know whether we should praise Bhattacharya’s public service announcement or lament how low our expectations have fallen for public health officials
Indeed, the CDC director suggesting the MMR is as impressive as my teenage son putting on his pants all by himself. While it’s better than nothing, I guess, this single milquetoast video on X isn’t going to make a meaningful difference. I’d actually be surprised if it led to a single child being vaccinated. If Dr. Bhattacharya actually wanted to influence vaccine-hesitant parents, he would have been promoting the MMR loudly and constantly for the past year.
These parents have been pickled by Dr. Bhattacharya’s depiction of public health officials as violent tyrants and Kennedy’s decade-long anti-vaccine crusade, which is stronger than ever thanks to the MAHA Institute. One video on X isn’t going to counter all that. And although Dr. Bhattacharya can succeed at his job only if parents vaccinate their children, even he can’t resist the comfort of his safe space, an anti-vaccine podcast. As he touts the MMR with one hand, he is still spreading anti-vaccine disinformation with the other.
After years of telling people not to trust the medical establishment, Dr. Bhattacharya is now the medical establishment. It’s his job to earn the trust of the American people, not the other way around, and he has no clue how to do that. While it’s good that everyone finally recognizes the emperor has no clothes, unvaccinated children will pay the price of his duplicitousness.
Dr. Bhattacharya will be just fine though, bravely podcasting his way through it all.