News and Insights
Has trust in science really collapsed?
October 6, 2026
Earning credibility amid uneven declines in trust
Public trust in science has “collapsed.” The claim appears so often that it can start to sound like an established fact.
During his September 27 conversation with Bill Gates on CNN, Fareed Zakaria used that word to describe declining trust in science and regulators after COVID. He also raised a more specific concern: people may be shifting their trust away from institutions toward individual voices online.
For those of us who communicate about health, the question has practical consequences. We cannot assume authority automatically creates credibility. We need to understand what people are being asked to trust, why they might hesitate and what an organization must do to earn their confidence.
The concern also appears in official policy. The May 2025 White House executive order Restoring Gold Standard Science stated that confidence in scientists acting in the public’s best interests had “fallen significantly.” It illustrates the breadth of concern, rather than independently measuring its scale.
Research shows substantial trust in scientists alongside serious erosion in confidence in some health institutions. People also distinguish between an agency and its leadership, between a physician they know and an organization they do not, and between confidence in research and confidence in a particular recommendation.
The evidence behind the alarm
Pew Research Center’s report published in January 2026 found that 77% of U.S. adults had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. That was down from 87% in April 2020, but essentially unchanged from the previous survey. The latest findings came from interviews conducted in October 2025.
The decline deserves attention. April 2020 was an early-pandemic high, however, and comparing two points misses what happened between them. Pew’s latest findings show confidence holding near the previous year’s level, below the April 2020 high. The intensity of trust also matters: 28% expressed a great deal of confidence, while 49% expressed a fair amount.
Political differences remain large. Confidence stood at 90% among Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults, compared with 65% among Republicans and Republican-leaning adults. That gap matters, as does the majority expressing confidence on both sides.
A global study published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025 also challenges the idea of a universal collapse. It surveyed nearly 72,000 people across 68 countries and found moderately high trust in scientists overall. Its data were collected in 2022–23, so it cannot establish the current trend. It does demonstrate why sweeping claims require care.
The institutional picture is more troubling. Annenberg Public Policy Center’s February 2026 survey found confidence in the CDC as a source of trustworthy public health information had fallen from 76% in February 2024 to 60%. Confidence in the FDA fell from 74% to 62%. (See the survey topline and methodology.)
These surveys ask different questions about different sources. Pew measures confidence in scientists acting in the public’s best interests. Annenberg measures confidence that agencies and their personnel provide trustworthy public health information. KFF asks about trust in sources providing reliable health information. They cannot be combined into a single score for “trust in science.” Taken together, they suggest that broad confidence in scientists can coexist with declining confidence in organizations responsible for applying and communicating science.
Nor does a favorable average make distrust harmless. An audience can express confidence in scientists generally and still reject a specific health recommendation. For communicators, the useful question is where confidence breaks down and what that means for the decision people face.
Authority and credibility
Annenberg found another revealing distinction: 67% expressed confidence in career scientists at federal health agencies to provide trustworthy public health information, compared with 43% for agency leaders.
In KFF’s June 2026 polling, 86% trusted their own doctor or health care provider at least a fair amount for reliable health information. About half trusted the CDC or FDA. Doctors remained a trusted source across political parties.
Trust is not given. It must be earned. For communicators, these differences are a warning against treating credibility as something an institutional title confers. A credential or regulatory mandate establishes expertise or responsibility. Audiences also make judgments about motives, candor and whether their concerns have been understood.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine addressed this directly in its research agenda on effective science communication: audiences decide whether a communicator and the institution represented are credible and trustworthy. Those judgments can vary by topic. Supplying more facts alone does not address all the experiences and values people bring to a conversation.
Consider a patient deciding whether to start a treatment. Approval matters. So do the size of the benefit, the risks, whether people like that patient were studied, what remains unknown and what the treatment will cost. An explanation that stops at “approved” leaves important questions unanswered.
Scientific evidence must remain the standard for claims about safety and effectiveness. Credible communication helps people understand that evidence in the context of their own decisions.
Listening that changes the work
The global trust study offers a useful distinction between perceived expertise and perceived openness. Seventy-eight percent believed scientists were qualified to conduct high-impact research. Only 42% believed scientists paid attention to others’ views somewhat or very much. And 83% agreed that scientists should communicate about science with the public.
Those findings suggest room for a more responsive conversation. Listening helps an organization understand whether someone is questioning a finding, struggling to apply it or asking a practical question that the explanation has missed.
A concern described as misinformation may include a false claim that needs correcting. It may also involve difficulty accessing care, an adverse experience or a tradeoff that deserves an answer. Taking the concern seriously helps us identify which response is needed.
How people seek information adds another dimension. KFF found that 31% of adults used social media for health information at least monthly. Among those who used it at least occasionally, 36% cited learning from people with similar conditions or experiences as a major reason; 35% cited immediate information or support.
These findings do not establish that trust has transferred from doctors to influencers. Seeking information and trusting it are different things. A patient may turn to a clinician for treatment advice and a peer community for help managing daily life.
There are real risks in that wider conversation. Only 36% of social media health-information users said they checked what they saw with a health professional every time or most of the time. Accurate information needs to be available and useful when people seek it, with a clear route to professional advice when needed.
The audience still weighing the evidence
Vaccine misinformation shows why we need to understand uncertainty as well as opposition. In its 2026 research, KFF identified a “mixed middle” comprising 31% of adults who judged some of four false vaccine claims to be true and others false, and answered “probably true” or “probably false” to at least half the claims.
KFF also found an association between lacking a trusted health care provider and endorsing vaccine falsehoods. That does not establish which causes which, or show that one conversation will change a belief. It does give communicators reason to pay attention to relationships alongside corrections.
A strategy designed entirely around committed opponents would overlook people still weighing conflicting information. Reaching those people requires understanding their questions and the sources they rely on. We should then evaluate whether our work improves understanding rather than assuming attention equals trust.
What health communicators should do
Different sources of doubt call for different responses. Organizations need to understand the audience’s concern before choosing a message, messenger or channel.
First, diagnose the concern before designing the message. Does the audience doubt the evidence, the organization’s motives or whether a recommendation applies to them? More data may help answer one question. Someone struggling to obtain care may need a practical response that extends beyond communications.
Second, make the evidence open to examination. Explain meaningful benefits and risks, who participated in a study, relevant funding and conflicts of interest, and what remains uncertain. When information changes, explain what changed and why. The National Academies cautions that omitting uncertainty can convey a false sense of certainty and undermine trust when expectations are later disappointed.
For pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, this means scrutinizing how we communicate a breakthrough. Readers should be able to understand what a study demonstrated and how far the findings extend. The headline and the supporting explanation should reflect the same evidence.
Third, make listening consequential. Patient and community input should be able to influence something people can see, such as trial accessibility, the questions addressed in an explanation or where information is available. Organizations should be able to show what they learned and how they responded.
Finally, measure understanding and usefulness alongside reach. Can people explain the finding accurately? Do they understand its limits? Do they know what question to ask next or where to obtain help? When health behavior is a goal, evaluate it directly where feasible. Impressions and engagement cannot establish that a campaign earned trust or improved health.
At FINN Partners, we take these responsibilities seriously in health and science communications. The audience’s decision connects the work: understanding what people are hearing helps us identify the questions our explanation must answer, while reviewing the evidence establishes what we can responsibly say. Listening to patients, clinicians and communities should shape both how we communicate and how an organization responds when people face barriers to acting on information. We evaluate that approach by asking whether people understood and could use what they received, alongside how many we reached.
Communications has an important role in earning credibility. An organization’s conduct must support the promises it makes. If information is difficult to obtain, trial participation is unnecessarily burdensome or concerns go unanswered, those problems need attention too.
Declining confidence in health institutions deserves serious attention. So does the substantial trust that remains. Understanding both gives health communicators a more useful starting point than assuming the public has rejected science altogether.
Scientific authority matters. Credibility depends on how that authority is exercised: whether people can examine the evidence, ask a difficult question and see that the question was taken seriously.
POSTED BY: Tom Jones
