When Americans no longer trust each other, the problem can be deadly. It hits rural areas the hardest, study shows

An unhealthy mistrust has spread across the U.S.
(ProMarket photo, University of Chicago)

Not being able to trust our neighbors or our country's leaders not only feels rotten, it can lead to physical illnesses. "People died in the pandemic because they didn't trust the government or their neighbors to do the right thing," reports Frank Morris of KCUR in Kansas City. "And it's not getting better. Today, distrust is making people sicker, especially where health care is fragile across giant swaths of rural America. . . . Tom Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said while the worst of the pandemic has passed (for now), the United States' deadly epidemic of mistrust is raging unchecked."

Bollyky was the lead author of a large study published in The Lancet this year, "taking a fine-grain look at Covid death and infection rates across the United States and the many factors that contributed to the differences," Morris writes. Bollyky told him: "This pandemic has been less about the microbe spreading around and more about the people to which it's spreading. It's about us, and how we feel about each other, and how we hang together as a community."

Morris reports, "Covid death rates varied wildly between states. The government tracked these rates as deaths per million people. New Hampshire lost 218 residents per million to Covid during the research period. New Hampshire has the highest rate of interpersonal trust in the U.S., as measured by long-running surveys testing trust between individuals. . . . Covid-19 was almost twice as deadly in Missouri as it was in New Hampshire. Almost a dozen other states fared even worse, partly due to distrust."

The pandemic years didn't just erode interpersonal trust, it decreased Americans' faith in vaccines overall. Brock Slabach, chief operations officer at the National Rural Health Association, told Morris, "And then, to add insult to injury, we have lower rates, for example, of childhood immunization that directly comes out of the pandemic and mistrust in vaccines generally. And so we're going to see childhood diseases that we thought we'd eradicated returning."

During and continuing after the pandemic, patient-doctor trust plummeted, and that distrust could make the next pandemic worse. Slabach told Morris: "Through the pandemic, we've added this issue of mistrust in the very professionals that for centuries we've valued as an important source of information for health and healthcare. . . . If we have another health crisis, this will come right back because we've not addressed some of the underlying issues. And so we're still going to be facing higher rates of disease, higher spread of death because of this misinformation and the lack of trust that we have in those areas of our system that know what to do in response."