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RE: Why we vaccinate for whooping cough during pregnancy
I think the public has trouble trusting for two reasons. The first is that there are clear cases where interventions clearly caused harm, sometimes due to incomplete information (say thalidomide) and sometimes due to malevolence on the part of drug companies. The second is that science is not always linear--recommendations on the best evidence today may be overturned in a few years. The general public doesn't have a good understanding of the scientific method and the media often don't help. Your posts are far more level headed and evidence-based than what many people will see in a 20 second blurb or a two line click-bait headline.
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So, when it comes to trust I think you’re dead on, except for one aspect: it is never the responsibility of the public to ‘trust’. This is something our team were playing around with in this paper (which we’ve managed to make open access so I should probably blog about it soon). If trust is lost, there is always something that we can do to make the system more ‘trust-worthy’. It’s like in teaching, there are no bad students only bad teachers. If my students aren’t understanding a topic that I’m talking about then it’s my responsibility to explain it in a different way so that they get it.
It’s not a perfect way to see the dynamic but at least it means that there is something that I can do to make the situation better (other than blaming people). In healthcare, if people have lost trust let’s find the reason why and work it improve it. E.g. Working closer with the media, or doing direct communication such as this.
Hey, thanks for your kind words, I will take your complement (something that I’m usually quite bad at)! However, I do have to say there is some incredible work being done around vaccine communication. E.g. the vaccine knowledge project and vaccine today it can just be hard to reach people sometimes.