“Herein lies the impossible irony of suggesting that vaccine skeptics talk to their doctors and of assuming that this patient-physician bond represents a durable and valued connection between individuals and the larger institutions of health and medicine. No such bonds exist anymore. Like so many other stories of the “declining trust in institutions,” the real story is not the decline in trust per se, but rather the failure of the institution. The increasingly expensive, arcane, and impersonal US health care system, with its harried practitioners, shock billing, impenetrable insurance coverages, and regionally monopolistic consolidation, leaves no room for trust, and certainly has no time for conversation. Is it really so surprising then that millions of Americans are more trusting of their favorite local radio personality, who talks to them for three or four hours every day (at least until he, too, dies of preventable Covid), or of the friends in their Facebook groups, than they are of a strange doctor whom they might see for three uncomfortable minutes once a year — often after an enraging two hours in a waiting room for an appointment made months prior?”
— Jacob Bacharach, Talk to Your Doctor
