Without trust, people will not listen to the advice of their government in an emergency and governments will not support the initiatives of other nations and intergovernmental institutions.
This week, we explore three different ways that trust broke down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Michelle D. Gavin, a former U.S. ambassador to Botswana and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, examines Africa’s crisis of trust in global health initiatives after COVID-19. She quotes one African leader noting that the global COVID-19 vaccine roll-out demonstrated with “unforgettable clarity” the little regard that Western nations have for African lives. Some fear eroding support for the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief threatens U.S. leadership on global health, but Gavin writes that many African governments already have doubts.
Keeping on the African continent, our next group of authors, from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discusses the struggle to reverse the region’s declining trust in COVID-19 vaccines. They cite misinformation, conspiracy theories, and anti-vaccination campaigns on social media as fueling hesitancy over these vaccines.
Finally, we interview Ali Mokdad, chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington, on a new twenty-one-country survey of the pandemic recovery, which measures trust in vaccines generally. Mokdad says, “Vaccination confidence was declining before COVID-19, but it’s in a sharp decline now.”
As always, thank you for reading.—Thomas J. Bollyky, Editor
