Public confidence in science has dropped below pre-pandemic levels worldwide, with the sharpest losses concentrated among people who feel financially squeezed. The findings come from the Wellcome Global Monitor 2026, a survey of more than 140,000 people in 140 countries, and were also reported by Phys.org.
Across countries included in the survey’s comparable 2018, 2020 and 2025 waves, 72% of respondents said they trusted science either “some” or “a lot” in 2025. That represents a decline from 77% in 2018 and the pandemic-era high of 80% in 2020. The overall figure masks an even more important divide: just 20% of people who said they were struggling to get by expressed “a lot” of trust, compared with 39% of those living comfortably.
The results suggest that skepticism is not simply a dispute over scientific facts or communication style. People’s day-to-day experience of public institutions appears to shape whether science feels useful, fair and worthy of confidence. The survey links weaker trust to poor access to health care, limited say over local research priorities and the perception that scientific advances benefit some communities while leaving others behind, according to Phys.org’s coverage.
Health care is especially significant. Reporting on the survey found that 43% of respondents with a great deal of confidence in their country’s hospitals and clinics also expressed “a lot” of trust in science, compared with 26% across respondents globally. That connection gives the findings a practical implication: when medical systems are inaccessible, unaffordable or unresponsive, confidence in the research and expertise behind them can suffer as well.
The financial gap has also widened since the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2025, strong trust fell 16 percentage points among people experiencing financial difficulty, compared with a 10-point decline among those living comfortably. In other words, the communities most likely to depend on effective public health and scientific infrastructure are increasingly less convinced that those systems are working for them.
For researchers, governments and science communicators, the report points toward a broader challenge than correcting misinformation. Rebuilding trust may require demonstrating tangible benefits, expanding public influence over research decisions and improving access to the services that make scientific progress visible in everyday life. The Wellcome Global Monitor’s next findings will show whether those efforts can reverse the post-pandemic decline, but the current data make one point difficult to ignore: trust in science is tied closely to whether people believe society is delivering fairly.
