Fragile trust and pale male leadership: Wellcome chief speaks out

Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar says we shouldn’t be surprised that trust in medicine and healthcare is fragile worldwide.

In June the United Kingdom-based Wellcome Trust published its Global Monitor 2019 mapping worldwide patterns of trust in healthcare and science. It found that Africans trust that vaccines are safe to a greater degree than their compatriots in Europe or North America. 

However, Africans also recorded some of the world’s lowest levels of trust in science and healthcare more generally. Having travelled earlier this year to North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where Ebola has taken hold in an area riven by conflict and poverty, Trust director Jeremy Farrar has thought deeply about how trust is built—and can be broken—by medical researchers.