Several new polls have appeared that confirm what you suspected. Trust in medical authority and pharmaceutical giants, along with their core product, have hit new lows.
The first comes from Gallup. “Fewer Americans today consider childhood vaccines important, with 40 percent saying it is extremely important for parents to have their children vaccinated, down from 58 percent in 2019 and 64 percent in 2001. There has been a similar decline in the combined ‘extremely’ and ‘very important’ percentage, which was 94 percent in 2001 but sits at 69 percent today.”
Still, full-on rejection of the whole system is rare. Only 1 percent believe vaccination is not important at all. And yet, we have traveled quite the distance from a near-universal and uncritical attitude toward ever-growing skepticism.
This should not shock us. A new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association documents that previous COVID-19 infection reduces risk of colds by 50 percent whereas vaccination alone reduces risk none at all. That is to say, natural immunity works whereas vaccination does not contribute to cross immunity. That is exactly what the voices of dissent were saying all along.
It is not just the vaccine for COVID-19, which made huge promises that could not possibly be sustained in reality. The entire medical and media complex promoted that shot which turned out to fail on many fronts. That reality has shattered the uncritical trust and now people are looking more carefully at the rest. And the next too: who precisely is going to voluntarily get this Bird Flu mRNA shot?
And this speaks to the second poll. This is from the Journal of the American Medical Association. It finds: “In every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443,455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the United States, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024. Individuals with lower levels of trust were less likely to have been vaccinated or received boosters for COVID-19.”
That is quite simply a shocking drop in trust. And look at the timing: 2020 to 2024. We all know what that was about. The medical industry nearly with one voice said that the virus was dangerous for absolutely everyone, and pretty much equally, which was clearly untrue even based on the earliest reporting. But the lockdowns themselves were premised on the assumption of a “whole of society” approach that led to the banning of all public activities and imposed stay at-home orders in many states.
Nothing like this had ever happened, but people were willing to go along, simply because most people presumed that there had to be something true about the fears, else leaders would not be saying and doing such things. Surely, too, if this fear was being exaggerated, certainly the medical profession would have been the first to blow the whistle. Instead, we saw media, medicine, government, and pharma all marching in lockstep as the economy was crushed and civil liberties were wrecked.
Having done four years of deep research into how all this unfolded, it has become increasingly obvious to me and many others that the whole idea from the beginning was to stay locked down until the vaccine could be deployed to rescue the population. The plan was entirely premised on the idea that the new technology, mRNA, would achieve something never before seen: the inoculation of the whole population against a fast-spreading and fast-mutating respiratory virus.
It was quite a gamble, essentially betting the whole house on one outcome that had never happened before. The result is well known even if few people are willing to speak about it publicly. The plan did not work. The vaccine was always behind the mutations. Natural immunity ended up covering the needs of the unvaccinated. And the vaccinated ended up dealing with more health problems as a result. Not a good outcome for the maiden voyage of a new technology.
The market for the shot, meanwhile, has completely collapsed, even though the virus circulates more than ever.
This is a hugely significant shift, one that has flipped the dynamic that has pervaded the history of public health from the late 19th century all the way to the present. It was a long history of earned trust. That has turned to distrust, and one might say that this distrust is also well-earned. A generation of pharmaceutical executives and government agencies decided to go all-in on a project that had very little hope of success.
In the end, these industries need public trust. So does government. That collapse of trust in all these institutions will have far-reaching consequences for the industries, for government, and for public health in general. On the plus side, we are seeing a growing movement for people to take greater charge of their own health, with a new interest in holistic health, better diet, and new doubts about the pharmaceuticals.
On the downside, people are more reluctant than ever to go to the doctor for routine checkups and diagnostics, and less likely even to press 911 for emergency services. It seems remarkable but in 2024, we’ve been set way back in terms of the reliability and credibility of medical care, in a country that beats every other in terms of per capita medical spending. At the same time, ill-health has never been more rampant in living memory as lifespans are actually falling for the first time in more than a century.
Something has gone very wrong, and it is not clear whether the loss of trust will help or hurt. The answer is probably a bit of both. That said, there is no great loss if individuals, families, and communities feel an ever stronger need to learn and act on their own in their own interest rather than rely on a system that is widely perceived to have failed them.
It seems strange and bitterly ironic that following the largest and most expensive public health intervention in human history that trust would have sunk so far, so dramatically, and is unlikely to recover for a generation. That is a problem that needs addressing. It certainly cannot be swept under the carpet, and the dissidents certainly should no longer be treated as problems to silence.
The people who expressed grave doubts about lockdowns and vaccine mandates should be given a hearing and spotlight. They were correct when the entire establishment was wrong. We might as well admit it. That is the beginning of the restoration of trust.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.
