In April 2020, at the very start of the COVID lockdown and mandates, 71.5% of Americans trusted doctors and hospitals. By January 2024, that number had plunged to only 40%. That's according to an investigation published recently by JAMA Network.
In the interim, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were barred from use; medical associations started pressing for mandatory vaccinations; and many people who went into the hospital with a seemingly manageable case of COVID or some other illness never came out.
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, president of Americans for Health Freedom, warned during a rally in 2020 that trust in the medical profession would suffer:
Bowden: "Medical freedom has been hijacked by hospitals, by insurance companies, by the government, and by Big Pharma …. Media censorship and the unwillingness of hospitals, the CDC, to give us very important information about COVID has bred extreme mistrust amongst the public."
Dr. Bowden later was criticized for promoting ivermectin as an early treatment for COVID patients. And as reported by the Dallas Express, she had her hospital privileges suspended in 2021 by Houston Methodist Hospital for alleging medical freedom had been "hijacked." The ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist eventually filed a lawsuit against the medical center.
In an interview with AFN, Twila Brase of Citizens' Council for Health Freedom argued that even though the business of medicine was broken well before the pandemic, Americans still trusted their doctors and hospitals with critical health decisions.
"I think COVID taught the American patient that the doctors aren't always in the corner of the patient," she noted.
And the mistrust, said Brase, is causing Americans to delay or even decline medical treatment. "Patients have been saying things like, 'I'm not going to go to a hospital anymore,' or 'I'm not going to see the doctor,'" she shared. "There's a lot of parents who are no longer following the childhood vaccine schedule."
According to Brase, that latter trend has caused public health and government officials to be "very worried."
In fact, as the JAMA Network article states, this study – in the context of similar, previous studies – "raise[s] the possibility that the decrease in trust during the pandemic could have long-lasting public health implications."
