Post 1:
Several mistakes were made early on in the pandemic, but the one I want to address is the inability of the public to accept that doctors are not omniscient. This has bugged me for months. As I work to vaccinate the Coast Guard, I hear several themes repeated. One goes like this… “Why should I believe what the CDC or any medical professional says now? They couldn’t make up their minds before, what would make me think they know what’s up with the vaccine?”
Everything that I’ve read about pandemic communications strategies insists that building trust with the public is critical and must be done early on, ideally even before an event takes place. In my opinion, transparency and honesty are fundamental to building trust. COVID-19 spread faster than doctors could learn about it. People started dying before the medical professionals were able to understand it. And the face of communications for a mysterious, potentially deadly, ghostly unknown faced a horrible challenge of balancing cautiousness against panic, of authority against fallibility.
For our leadership, the people we trust, the authorities on all things health and medical to admit they don’t know undermines their confidence and the public’s. But it was true and I prefer to hear someone say they don’t know, and they are working as fast as they can to get more information. They weren’t lying!! And not knowing is ok! We, the public, couldn’t be patient enough to let the professionals learn more. At this point in my tirade I could blame the 24 hour news cycle, the politicians looking out for their constituents (and the next election) and/or the lack of general education or transparent communications from the CDC. I posit that it is all of these things that conspired to severely limit the American public’s willingness to believe the science and get vaccinated.