Between March 2020 and December 2022, several polls asked people how much trust they had in Dr Anthony Fauci: a great deal, a fair amount, not much, or not at all. Most of the questions mentioned Covid--"trust him to provide reliable information on coronavirus." The means by party identification, counting "great deal" as 4 .... "not at all" as 1.
There's very little change between June 2021 and December 2022. That is, the partisan polarization of trust took place between March 2020 and June 2021--nothing that happened in the next 18 months made much difference. It's also a high degree of polarization: in June 2021, 61% of Democrats said they had a great deal of trust in Fauci and only 5% said they had none; among Republicans, 11% said they had a great deal and 50% said not at all. A few days ago, Bret Stephens wrote "I was prepared to cut Fauci and others in government a lot of slack in the first months of the pandemic, when the take-no-chances approach seemed like the safest course. But at some point many of the measures that he insisted were necessary .... felt both onerous and performative, and guaranteed to create a backlash." Whether or not that was true for him, it doesn't seem to have been true for most Republicans--they shifted against him right away rather than waiting.
There were also several questions about trust in national public health officials or the CDC. They followed the same basic pattern: no partisan differences at the beginning and then a split, but the eventual partisan gap was smaller than with Fauci. Finally, there were some questions about trust in Donald Trump to provide reliable information about Covid. Of course, there was a partisan split on Trump from the beginning. But did it also get bigger, or had it already reached its ceiling? I'll look at that in a future post.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
