Megan Trotter | news editor |

As this year’s flu season begins to flourish, Duquesne professors examined how politics has intersected with science and health care in recent years and led to an overwhelming issue – public distrust in scientists.

On Wednesday, The National Library of Medicine exhibit held its final event, a webinar, as part of an ongoing “The Politics of Yellow Fever in Alexander Hamilton’s America” series hosted by Gumberg Library.

Panelist Kristin Klucevsek, teaching associate professor of scientific writing, said that public trust in scientists was relatively stable from the 1970s till the start of the pandemic.

Data from both the National Science Foundation and the Pew Research Center shows stability in public trust, scientists and what they do. However, that number started to dip during the pandemic after the first year.

“People who reported being Republican or leaning Republican are more likely to have less trust in scientists than people who are more Democratic leaning,” Klucevsek said. “People who reported Republican were less likely to mask in public or less likely to socially distance themselves than people reported Democrat, so their response to the pandemic also correlates with that trust.”

This partisan trend is not unique to the U.S. and has been reported in Europe as well, according to Klucevsek.

Associate Professor and Director of Ethics for the School of Nursing Eric Vogelstein said that one of the major underlying factors leading to public distrust is any government regulation or lack of regulation such as lockdown, school closures, mask or vaccine mandates, which implicates traditional left versus right dynamics.

“It’s a controversial issue, but in any case, distrust of institutions and individuals can result from that blending of controversial moral and political views and clinical guidelines and policy, insofar as one thinks those institutions and individuals are ideologically based or stepping far beyond their scientific and medical expertise into ethical controversies,” Vogelstein said.

Klucevsek said that much of the scientific research involved in health care happens behind closed doors and that the general person is not trained on how to read and understand all the research that is released to the public.

“There’s also this concept before the pandemic of ‘nerds of trust,’ where scientists have needed … to have a greater role in this process of translation. They need to be more engaged in this process,” Klucevsek said.
 Because most people don’t have exposure to scientists or scientific consensus, they get their information from the government, Vogelstein said.

“Their exposure is via the government, in many cases, which is inevitably political,” Vogelstein said. “They’ll often think, for example … Dr. [Anthony] Fauci or Biden’s former [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] director, Dr. [Rochelle] Walensky, who are charged with setting policy and making recommendations that are sometimes politically or ethically inflected.”

However, Vogelstein does not believe that the controversy regarding the handling of the Covid pandemic, which took place while former President Donald Trump was in office, will be influential to the polls in this

“I haven’t seen that issue on polls asking people what their top voting issues are, but I’d suspect that these issues will have minimal impact in 2024. The general issue of Covid was one of the primary drivers of Biden’s election in 2020 — in particular, based on the prior administration’s response to Covid — and so the prevailing issue for the public four years ago wasn’t about misinformation, but rather mishandling. In any case, I don’t see this being a significant issue in 2024 — I think it’s mostly run its course in terms of people voting on it,” Vogelstein said to The Duke.

Panelist Lauren O’Donnell, an associate professor, said that in terms of scientific development there were some good things which resulted from the pandemic such as various medications, antivirals, monoclonal drugs and rapid at-home tests.

“I … wish that the pandemic had been smoother and that more people could have been saved, and that there could have been less disruption to everyone’s lives. But I also see science being applied in a way that was effective and that ultimately, I think, had a positive impact on how things turned out,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell told The Duke that based on a report from the CDC, the rate of yearly influenza vaccination in children and adults declined from this past year.

“We don’t know the reasons behind this decline, so we can’t speak yet to how much public distrust has played a role. But, even before the Covid pandemic, there was a great deal of misinformation circulating about vaccines, and I think that misinformation is still a very real concern today,” O’Donnell said.