Why I’m doubling down on Trust in the War against COVID
Mistrust is the sand in the wheels of any society trying to develop.
As the US transitions towards some semblance of normalcy, Brazil and India continue to reel under the onslaught of COVID, and even countries that had managed the pandemic well, like Taiwan, are feeling the effects of this scourge, and parts of Africa are trying to learn from others’ experiences so as to forestall trouble ahead.
Recently, The Lancet Citizens’ Commission for Reimagining India’s Health System, of which I am one of four co-chairs, issued this synthesis of urgent actions to stem the tide of the virus in India. This represents the good-faith effort of dozens of institutions in India involved in healthcare delivery and related scientific research to amplify state-of-the-art understanding.
I found myself asking why it was necessary for us to publish that short comment. At least part of the answer is that there is a low level of ambient trust in the manner in which the pandemic has been handled. And it’s not hard to see how that has transpired. For example, in the early days of the COVID pandemic, there was much confusion about contact-tracing, its purpose, the right mechanisms for it, and its uses and abuses. Now, contact-tracing is predicated on a degree of ambient trust. Some of this can be substituted for by technology, but not all of it. Today, we have vaccine hesitancy, mistrust about vaccines, even though these are amazingly effective thus far (both the new-fangled mRNA ones and those made using the traditional adenovirus vector methods).
The mistrust emanates partly from inability to access credible information. Whom should I believe, says an uninformed person, when all manner of information circulates willy-nilly on the web and more broadly? I wrote about these information sanctity issues early in the pandemic. Alleviating this mistrust is a central task of the healthcare practitioner and policymaker, seeking to create a testing or vaccine delivery service, or introducing policies to smooth the acts of doing so.
But, even if one accepts my premise that Trust Matters, there is the practical issue of how to cultivate trust. Indeed, is it practical to counsel someone to cultivate trust? My short answer is- Yes. Very much so.
A lot of my work in recent years has addressed this how problem – the cultivation of what I call Contextual Intelligence – to the particular circumstances of individual entrepreneurs. Investing in trust-building is not just possible, it is a necessary and sufficient condition for achievable impact at scale. This is as true for entrepreneurs in the private sector as it is for those in public service, whether one seeks commercial returns or generalized societal betterment.
Recently I gave a virtual address at Amity University that caused me to revisit some broad-brush principles I had articulated a few years ago in a synthetic set of story-essays with which I had some involvement. These are recounted in my book Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries. There I discussed concrete principles underlying trust-building in various settings- e-commerce and agribusiness in China, mobile telephony in Africa, microfinance in Mexico, tertiary health in India, and so on.
Mistrust is the sand in the wheels of any society trying to develop. It’s everywhere, alas. One of my pet peeves is the way it results in developing countries’ often self-destructive dismissal of science. This comes in several flavors. There is mutual recrimination between scientists and businesspeople – the latter decrying the former as impractical and the former reciprocating with charges of corruption and short-sightedness. There is a false equation of a scientific mindset as being antithetical to a society’s traditions. Several of our ancient civilizations have progressed most when embracing a questioning and respectful mindset – central attributes of science. Finally, there is bureaucratic inertia, even sclerosis, which amounts to a de facto dismissal of science.
As a glass half-full kind of person, all these seem to me to be addressable. In India, I’m fortunate to partner with Dr K Vijayraghavan, the Principle Science Advisor to the Government of India, to try to build policy-induced trust-building mechanisms to counter science phobia.
Think about how much pain could be resolved if vaccine hesitancy could be magically erased. Think about how much innovation we could unlock in developing countries if scientists and entrepreneurs worked together. Trust building is the key to this, and this ‘soft idea’ can be operationalized in a hard-nosed fashion. Indeed, the proposition that cultivating ambient trust is as close as one could get to a panacea for economic and social development should be uncontroversial.
That’s why I’m doubling down on Trust, and not just in the war against COVID.