A worldwide Wellcome survey finds that public trust in science has fallen since peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the steepest drops among people struggling financially.
Public confidence in science is sliding from its pandemic-era peak, according to a new global survey, with the steepest declines concentrated among people struggling financially and in parts of Africa and Asia. The findings arrive as scientific institutions worldwide face funding pressure, misinformation, and political scrutiny, raising the stakes for understanding which publics are pulling away from science, and why. “Public trust shapes whether scientific advances can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives,” John-Arne Røttingenchief executive officer of Wellcome, said in a news release accompanying the report.
The data come from the Wellcome Global Monitor 2026a report from Wellcome, a London-based research foundation, that surveyed more than 140,000 adults in 140 countries in 2025. Comparing the 108 countries that have taken part in all three rounds of the survey since it began, 72 percent of respondents reported “some” or “a lot” of trust in science, down from an 80 percent peak in 2020 and below the 77 percent recorded in 2018, the survey’s first year.
What the Data Shows: Trust in Science Fell after a Pandemic-Era Peak
Trust in science across the 108 countries surveyed in every round rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, then fell back below its 2018 level by 2025, according to the Wellcome Global Monitor 2026.
Adapted from Wellcome, 2026. Image generated using Claude.
By the Numbers
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The decline was not uniform, and the overall picture is mixed: Globally, more people still trust scientists “a lot” than trust national governments or journalists, and Carmelo Polino of the University of Oviedo told SciDev.Net that the decline “does not signify a widespread crisis of confidence.” But commentators pointed to a specific driver behind the steepest drops: economic hardship.
Evelyn Gitauchief scientific officer at the Science for Africa Foundation, said the pattern reflects lived experience in communities where science has not visibly solved pressing problems. “It’s people saying: My life is hard, and while I know science can fix it, it’s not fixing it. So I have no trust,” she told SciDev.Net. The report does not examine research-integrity concerns as a driver, though those have drawn their own scrutiny, including a recent survey finding that more than 90 percent of researchers at Portuguese universities admitted to at least one questionable research behavior.
Wellcome’s report also found uneven regional recovery from the pandemic-era trust bump: Parts of Africa saw no equivalent rise after COVID-19, a pattern Gitau linked to unequal access to COVID-19 vaccines, while trust in some Latin American countries, including Brazil and Chile, shifted markedly across the three survey waves: in Chile, the share of people with at least some trust in science fell from 81 percent in 2020 to 63 percent in 2025, while in Brazil it rose from 64 percent in 2018 to 76 percent in 2020 and stood at 74 percent in 2025.
The survey is observational, drawing correlations between financial security, institutional confidence, and trust in science rather than establishing cause and effect, and the report’s authors caution that a single global figure masks sharp country-to-country variation. The report also notes that a change in how China was surveyed in 2025 has a substantial influence on the global average; excluding China, trust looks more stable between 2018 and 2025, though the share trusting science “a lot” has fallen since 2020 either way.
Why It Matters: Trust Is Falling Fastest Among the Financially Strained
The implications extend beyond public opinion. Lower trust could erode public support for research funding and for public health guidance at a time when scientific institutions in many countries already face budget pressure. However, the report cautions that “the relationship between trust in science and vaccine decisions is not straightforward.” Science communicators have increasingly turned to direct public outreach to rebuild that confidence. The report’s authors argue that durably restoring trust will require more than showing that science delivers benefits: Governments, scientists, funders, and scientific institutions need to earn trust in ways that reflect the societies they serve.
Use of AI Declaration: This article was produced under The Scientist’s AI Editorial Policy.
Source: www.the-scientist.com
