America Trusts Science More — And Is More Polarized Over It — SkimNews
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- Wellcome Global Monitor surveyed more than 140,000 adults across 140 countries for its 2025 edition and found 52% of Americans report "a lot" of trust in science, compared with 26% globally.
- American vaccine attitudes run ahead of peers on enthusiasm but also on refusal: 45% of Americans say they'd get a recommended vaccine "right away" versus 28% in Germany, while 13% of Americans say they wouldn't get vaccines at all, compared with 8% of Germans.
- The share of Americans agreeing that science benefits most people rose from 48% in 2018 to 57% in 2025, while the global share dropped from 42% to 37% over the same period.
- Internal US divisions are far wider than in peer nations: a 24-percentage-point gap separates religious and non-religious Americans on whether science benefits people (vs. a 5-point gap in other high-income countries), a 19-point urban-rural gap (vs. 3 points), and 47% of Americans without four-year degrees agree science benefits people, compared with 71% of college graduates.
- The US divide is widening because highly educated and secular Americans have grown more appreciative — up 13 points among college graduates and 15 points among secular Americans since 2018 — while religious Americans moved only 46% to 50%.
- Just 40% of Americans report "a lot" of confidence in US hospitals and health clinics, matching Portugal and Uruguay, and several experts cited anti-science rhetoric from top political officials as a likely factor in polarization.
Why it matters: The survey's central paradox — higher aggregate science trust paired with deeper religious, geographic, and educational polarization — suggests future public-health campaigns in the US will face uneven uptake across communities. Only 40% of Americans express strong confidence in US hospitals, the same share as Portugal and Uruguay, signaling that breakthroughs aren't being felt equally across the country.
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