NPR's David Greene talks to Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, about why trust could be a key issue in the fight against COVID-19.
Andrew Harnik/APFor Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama, the fundamental issue at play isn't simply a slow turnaround for virus test results or mask mandates."I think we see it everywhere," Slavitt tells NPR."We see it in the presidential briefings and the inability to trust what we hear
[about it]. We're used to hearing [drug recommendations] from the FDA. We're seeing it among ourselves when some people say that we should be wearing masks and we won't."You take the governor of Texas or Arizona, and you see the absolute hell that New York goes through and you don't trust it, and you don't take actions that the governors of New York and Connecticut are pleading with you to take.
Where this will really come to play out in the short order is when we have a vaccine. Will enough Americans trust that this vaccine is safe and effective when they've been hearing from various parties like the president that a certain drug is safe or a certain drug is not safe and there's not one body — the great institutions that we've come to trust as being impenetrable by politics, we're not sure if they are any longer.Some of it is cultural.
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