Five years ago, suggesting that COVID-19 may have originated in a laboratory rather than a wet market could earn someone the label “conspiracy theorist.”

Discussing vaccine injuries could result in a post being removed from social media. Questioning prolonged school closures, forced masking, or vaccine mandates often led to accusations of being “anti-science.”

Today, many of those once-forbidden discussions have become part of public debate.

That doesn’t mean every alternative theory is correct.

But it raises an important question.

The answer may be found in Rasmussen Reports’ latest survey.

Nearly half of Americans — 45 percent — now believe it is at least somewhat likely that COVID-19 was deliberately released as part of an effort to reduce the world’s population.

Not five percent.

Not fifteen percent.

Nearly half of the country.

I am not arguing that this belief is true. I have seen no evidence that COVID was part of a deliberate depopulation plan, and the Rasmussen survey does not make that claim.

But public opinion tells us something equally important.

Americans increasingly assume the worst about the institutions that once enjoyed their confidence.

In my recent Rasmussen Reports column, I argued that the greatest casualty of COVID was trust.

This new survey underscores just how profound that loss has become.

Conspiracy theories rarely flourish in societies where institutions are transparent, accountable, and willing to admit mistakes.

They flourish where information is incomplete, official explanations shift repeatedly, and legitimate questions are dismissed rather than answered.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Transparency fills that vacuum. Secrecy fills it with suspicion.

When government agencies refuse to fill that vacuum with openness, the public fills it with speculation.

Some of that speculation will prove wrong.

Some may ultimately prove correct.

History suggests that both outcomes are inevitable.

The point is that the vacuum never stays empty.

Consider how many official narratives changed during the pandemic.

The lab-leak hypothesis was widely dismissed before it became a plausible explanation worthy of serious investigation.

The effectiveness of cloth masks became far more contested than early public messaging had suggested.

Extended school closures are now widely acknowledged to have imposed significant educational and psychological costs.

Claims that vaccination would prevent transmission gave way to more nuanced discussions about reducing severe illness and hospitalizations.

Government coordination with social media companies over COVID-related content have become the subject of congressional investigations and court cases.

Even recent disclosures about U.S.-supported biological laboratories overseas have fueled public skepticism, regardless of how those facts are interpreted.

None of this proves a grand conspiracy.

But it does explain why many Americans have stopped giving government officials the benefit of the doubt.

Trust works much like a marriage does.

Imagine one spouse repeatedly offering incomplete explanations, changing their story, deleting text messages, and insisting, “Nothing to see here.”

Perhaps there is an innocent explanation.

Perhaps there isn’t.

But evasiveness itself breeds suspicion.

Eventually, the other spouse begins to assume the worst—not necessarily because of what has been proven, but because confidence has been lost.

Governments are no different.

Trust isn’t destroyed by a single disagreement. It’s destroyed by a pattern of evasiveness.

Public trust depends less on perfection than on honesty

People generally understand that science evolves, and physicians certainly do.

Medicine is full of uncertainty. Recommendations change as evidence accumulates. At least they should

What patients find difficult to forgive is not an honest mistake.

It is the perception that information was withheld, inconvenient questions were discouraged, or uncertainty was replaced with unwarranted certainty.

Experienced physicians know that malpractice suits are often driven less by honest medical errors than by patients who believe they were misled or kept in the dark.

If officials had openly acknowledged what they didn’t know, admitted when recommendations changed, and explained why, public confidence might well be stronger today.

If physicians communicated with patients as many public officials did during COVID, informed consent would rightly be called into question.

Now, many Americans assume that every official statement conceals an undisclosed truth.

That should concern everyone.

The real danger isn’t whether one believes a particular conspiracy theory.

The danger is that millions of Americans no longer believe that the institutions responsible for protecting public health merit the presumption of honesty.

Trust, once lost, is very difficult to regain.

Public health depends on voluntary cooperation.

The next pandemic will almost certainly occur.

When it does, officials will once again ask Americans to believe them and to follow their recommendations.

But credibility cannot be restored through fact-checks, public relations campaigns, or censorship.

It can be restored only through transparency, humility, accountability, and a willingness to admit mistakes.

Transparency is the antidote to conspiracy theories.

If mistakes were made, the public deserves an honest accounting. If misconduct occurred, accountability should follow. Without either, official assurances will remain hollow.

If those qualities remain absent, Americans will continue connecting the dots — sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly, but almost always suspiciously.

The real lesson of Rasmussen’s poll isn’t that nearly half of Americans believe a depopulation theory. The real lesson is that nearly half of Americans now consider such a theory plausible. 

Those are not the same

Ironically, the officials who warned most loudly about “dangerous conspiracy theories” seldom paused to ask why those theories were gaining traction. People rarely abandon trusted institutions without cause.

That should alarm every physician, scientist, public health official, and elected leader across America.

Distrust doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated when certainty supplants humility and questions are treated as threats rather than as opportunities for inquiry.

Trust is the foundation upon which modern medicine rests. Once that foundation is fractured, rebuilding it may take generations­—far longer than it took to destroy it

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Colorado-based ophthalmologist who writes frequently about medicine, science, and public policy.

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