Science, trust and traffic jams: How to avoid being part of the problem we want to solve

As the new year gets under way, I am regularly asked what I expect it to bring for my company, the generics industry and the world in general. And that’s often coupled with a question about what we have learned to date from the Covid pandemic.

I’ve written in the past about various aspects of the latter but thought today might be a good opportunity to take a step back and look at the bigger picture: in particular, the growing lack of social trust that increasingly challenges acceptance of the basic scientific principles underpinning modern medicine.

Yes, you’ve guessed it: I’m thinking particularly of the minority of people who remain suspicious of or even hostile to the use of Covid-19 vaccines (not to mention vaccination in general).

Not my jam...

I used to think this was just about failure – or at least reluctance – to understand the science. But it’s become increasingly clear to me that the underlying issue is something far more fundamental: trust (or lack of it) in the companies that produce these critical medications and in the governments that approve and distribute them.

This point came home to me recently when I read an interview with Heidi Larson, the founding director of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project. She spoke of her own “road to Damascus” moment when she was sitting in a seemingly never-ending traffic jam in New Delhi and suddenly saw a sign with the slogan: “You’re not stuck in the jam – you are the traffic”.

The point is simple, but critical: people’s views of the same situation can differ radically depending not on the facts, but on their perspective, experience and ability to control the situation. The transport policy expert busy counting cars and crunching data nationwide will view the individual traffic jam very differently to the driver trying to get to (or from) the office on time.

Licence to operate

It’s a lesson that everyone involved in developing and delivering healthcare, from pharmaceutical manufacturers through to government agencies, needs to take on board. Public trust (or reputation) is not a nice-to-have, it is the essence of what you might call our continued “licence to operate”. And winning it involves listening to people’s concerns, not just lecturing to them.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we have to convince everyone: be it vaccines, essential medicines or even basic hospital care, there will always be a small minority that we can never “reach”.

But we need to do everything we can to prevent that minority becoming a sizeable chunk of society – by ensuring we act ethically, responsibly and with a view to the overall social impact of everything we do.

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