In a society where trust in government institutions is waning, one would expect Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Mandy Cohen to make it her mission to regain our confidence. But pushing forward yet another COVID-19 “booster” for everyone as young as 6 months old is hardly the best move.
Let’s be clear: Trust isn’t a commodity you can buy off the shelf; it must be earned through consistent and transparent actions over time. And right now, the CDC has a trust deficit that no vaccine can cure.
Trust is a delicate thing — easily shattered and painstakingly slow to rebuild. As most of us understand, you can’t mend broken trust with a public relations campaign or a series of tweets. But this appears to be where the CDC is fumbling. The actions that the agency seems to think will regain public trust instead show a close-minded carelessness that only makes the problem worse.
Perhaps the most crucial mistake is ignoring its critics. Esteemed professionals like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, known for their critical views on lockdown measures, haven’t had an audience with the CDC’s director. Inviting different perspectives for an open conversation should be a no-brainer in an attempt to rebuild trust, much less actually discern the truth. If Cohen were indeed serious about mending bridges, such a meeting should have been scheduled the first week of her tenure.
Let’s consider five concrete steps for rebooting trust, some of which were highlighted by Houman Hemmati, an ophthamologist:
n Transparency first: The CDC should release all its internal correspondence from November 2019 onwards. Black out the social security numbers and personal phone numbers, but let the public see the decision-making process. No exceptions.
n Clean house: Employees with connections to pharmaceutical companies, other government agencies, or unions — entities that could skew objectivity — need to go. So do those who have tried to censor or shame critics of the agency.
n Policy overhaul: Make it an agency policy never to issue or recommend mandates or closures for schools and businesses. Period.
n Uniform standards: All treatments and vaccines — COVID-19 or otherwise — should be held to the exact same review standards. An emergency shouldn’t excuse cutting corners in safety protocols or efficacy evaluations.
n Open peer reviews: Any medical product should undergo a thorough review involving a panel of outside experts. Of course, critics should be part of this process. No more consensus through censorship.
These aren’t just token gestures; they provide foundational shifts that could genuinely restore public trust. Anything less will amount to hollow words, adding to the already stifling cacophony of empty promises we’ve become so accustomed to. Right-leaning or left-leaning, any agency dictating universal mandates apart from bipartisan dialogue reveals a contemptuous disregard for public trust.
In this respect, the CDC’s current strategy mirrors the broader trend in American politics: a tendency to double down rather than admit a mistake; a preference for speaking to echo chambers rather than engaging with critics; a habit of ignoring the inconvenient in favor of the expedient. The absence of honesty in our public institutions is a bipartisan failure, contributing to the erosion of trust that got us here in the first place.
If there’s one lesson the CDC — and indeed, all our public institutions — should take from this, it’s that trust is not a switch you flip on and off. It’s a slow build, dependent on a consistent track record of transparent and unbiased action. The path to regaining lost trust isn’t through grand gestures, but through a long, humbling process of doing better — each day, every day. Anything short of this is merely treating symptoms while ignoring the disease, a strategy that public health experts should recognize as both futile and dangerous.
The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone: A health agency should know better than to offer band-aid solutions to deep, systemic issues. And until they step it up, we will remain justifiably mistrusting.
Courtney served 20 years as a nuclear engineering officer aboard submarines and 15 years as a graduate school instructor. A political independent, he spends his time playing with his seven grandchildren in Moscow.
