Performative doubt and the fight for public trust

Abstract

Writing from the US, Lucinda Hiam argues that public health must acknowledge uncertainty transparently, while unflinchingly confronting bad faith political figures who peddle lies and exploit mistrust In an interview during the final weeks of the Brexit campaign in June 2016, then Lord Chancellor Michael Gove famously said: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts [from organizations with acronyms] saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”1 Nearly a decade later, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr echoed this sentiment in an interview in August 2025, saying that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it’s a feature of totalitarianism and of religion.”2 This framing undermines valid scrutiny: science is organized skepticism, not blind trust. Yet these attacks land because they exploit genuine grievances with medicine and public institutions alongside manufactured suspicion. What we face is not ordinary doubt, but the deliberate weaponization of perceived uncertainty …