In April 2020, 72 percent of Americans trusted physicians and hospitals. That number fell to just 40 percent by January of 2024. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic is to blame. After years of lockdowns and mandates, less than half of Americans trust their medical system. And crucially, these results hold true across all social and demographic groups.

As the journal reports, “the decrease in trust during the pandemic could have long-lasting public health implications.” The authors of the study worry that people may reject vaccination because they’ve lost trust in the medical system, but this is only one potential result. Lower trust in doctors could also lead Americans to ignore recommendations of all kinds.

If the survey results are in fact representative—and with over 400,000 respondents, that is possible—then the decline in trust in the medical system is just a side effect of COVID-19 policy. And it joins a long list of unintended consequences.

Lockdowns, for example, put an end to decades of progress in eradicating global poverty and its associated evils, such as child labor, prostitution, and slavery. While the upper classes of advanced Western countries saw their wealth grow as stock markets boomed, the world’s most vulnerable families were locked out of economic activity. The results were often deadly.

As one peer-reviewed article explains, “Various strategies such as physical distance, school closures, trade restrictions, and countries’ lockdown to control the pandemic have increased the nutritional challenges around the world, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) with the highest populations.” If they had been given the choice between COVID-19 and starvation, what do you think these vulnerable people would have chosen for themselves and their children?

Yet the side effects of COVID-19 intervention weren’t confined to the developing world—far from it. In the United States, almost 40 percent of adults reported symptoms of anxiety and depression from April 2020 to February 2021 as social isolation became the norm during the pandemic. Tragically, drug overdoses sharply increased, and suicide rates rose as well.

Nowhere were these changes more pronounced than among the youth. In fact, over 80 percent of young people reported that COVID-19 had a negative impact on their mental health. Similar numbers said that it had a deleterious impact on their work, study, and personal lives. These effects were not inconsequential.

Shockingly, in 2021, which saw some of the most restrictive school closures, more than 1 in 5 students seriously considered attempting suicide, and 1 in 10 actually attempted suicide. Though the CDC has yet to publish comprehensive data for the following years, evidence suggests that these numbers won’t be improving anytime soon.

In addition to the millions of excess deaths due to starvation, unsafe working conditions for children, and suicide, COVID-19 interventions wreaked havoc on businesses large and small. It’s likely that these economic impacts—and the human suffering they represent—will add fuel to flames of divisive politics around the world. Though it’s impossible to quantify these side effects of the global lockdowns, they are troubling nonetheless.

It’s not at all surprising that trust in medical institutions fell during the pandemic. The evidence shows that medical experts were not deserving of trust in the first place.

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