Global trust in science just fell below pre-COVID levels

Global trust in science has fallen below where it stood before the pandemic, erasing the surge of confidence the COVID era created. The finding comes from the world's largest study of public attitudes toward science, unveiled in October 2026 at the World Health Summit in Berlin. Drawing on survey data from more than one hundred forty thousand adults across one hundred forty countries, the research shows that the glow of the pandemic years — when nightly vaccine updates made science feel indispensable — has faded almost entirely.

The headline numbers tell a story of a trust boom followed by a bust. Across the one hundred eight countries surveyed in all three waves of the study, in 2018, 2020, and 2025, seventy-two percent of people expressed at least some trust in science last year. That is down from eighty percent in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and also below the seventy-seven percent recorded in 2018 before anyone had heard of COVID. Meanwhile the share of people who trust science "not much" or "not at all" has grown to nineteen percent, up from thirteen percent in both earlier waves, according to the Wellcome Global Monitor report.

That trust in science has sunk below pre-pandemic levels matters because the drop is not evenly spread. It is concentrated among the people who can least afford to lose it.

The people who need science most trust it least

The steepest losses in trust in science are among people struggling financially, turning this into an inequality story rather than a misinformation story. People who said they were living comfortably on their present income were around twice as likely to trust science "a lot" — thirty-nine percent versus twenty percent among those who said they were finding it difficult to get by. Since 2018 that gap has widened from thirteen to nineteen percentage points.

Financial hardship doesn't just correlate with lower trust in science — the decline was sharper there too. Strong trust fell by sixteen percentage points among those struggling between 2020 and 2025, compared with ten points among the comfortable, as reported by Bloomberg News. Countries with greater economic inequality also tended to score lower on trust in science, and people with less confidence in their national institutions or higher perceptions of corruption were less likely to trust science as well.

Why would being broke make someone distrust science? The report's framing offers a serious answer: trust in science tracks visible relevance. When people can't see science delivering for them — when new treatments are priced out of reach, when their local clinic is understaffed, when the economy that science powers still leaves them behind — skepticism looks less like irrationality and more like a rational read of their own experience. People who had a lot of confidence in their country's hospitals and clinics, for instance, were far likelier to trust science strongly, at forty-three percent, than the global average of twenty-six percent.

That same logic shows up in how people judge who science is for. Eighty-one percent of respondents said the work of scientists benefits people like them — but just thirty-seven percent said it benefits "most" people in their country, and one in five said it benefits "very few." In other words, most people believe in science for themselves while doubting it delivers broadly. That split is the inequality story in a single statistic.

What falling trust means for Gen Z's future

For Gen Z, this isn't an abstract trend — it is already shaping the world you live in. The retreat of trust in science has potentially far-reaching consequences for public health as vaccination rates decline and preventable diseases return. The United States is living through its worst measles outbreak in three decades, with nearly four thousand cases this year, while childhood vaccination rates have slipped below the levels needed to prevent outbreaks in many communities, as reported by Bloomberg News.

The link between trust in science and shots in arms is direct. When the survey asked what people do when a doctor or nurse recommends a vaccine, only about a third said they would take it immediately, nearly half preferred to think about it, and fifteen percent said they don't get vaccinated at all. Those who wanted a recommended vaccine right away were twice as likely to express a lot of trust in science as those who refused vaccines entirely — thirty-six percent versus eighteen percent. Falling coverage matters beyond the individual, because vaccines also shield people who can't be vaccinated or whose immune systems don't respond strongly.

The picture isn't all bleak. Scientists remain among the most trusted groups in society, ranking above governments and journalists, and about seven in ten people globally still trust science at least somewhat. Trust in science rose fastest wherever it became visibly useful during the pandemic — proof that the metric moves with lived experience, not just belief.

That is also the counterpoint worth taking seriously. Falling trust in science isn't purely a story of conspiracy theories and doomscrolling. The politicization of vaccines, masks, and public health measures during the pandemic — "politics has made some of science more political," as Wellcome chief executive John-Arne Røttingen put it in an interview from Berlin — gave many people reason to feel that science had become just another faction. And for those struggling financially, science can look like part of a broader system that isn't working for them. "Science is seen as one of those institutions that are not delivering," Røttingen said. That's a critique of access and accountability, not just a literacy problem — and any recovery of trust will have to answer it.

Rebuilding starts with relevance. Science that visibly improves daily life — affordable care, honest answers from local clinics — earns confidence in a way lectures don't. The pandemic bump happened because science was suddenly, visibly essential. For a generation that will staff the labs, run the hospitals, and set the research agendas of the next fifty years, keeping it visible is now the hard part — whether you're planning a career in science or simply deciding about the next vaccine. Explore more long-form coverage of the forces shaping science and society in Deep Dives, and read how AI is changing what it means to be a scientist.