I don't need no doctor

 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.

In the first survey (3/21-34/2020) the average level of trust was almost identical among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.  Democratic trust seemed to increase a little in 2020 and then declined, but the changes were small.  Republican trust dropped sharply in the second survey (late August/early September 2020), and then continued to declined at a slower rate.  Independents were just about halfway in between.  The gap between average Democratic and Republican trust:

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]