This maybe a violation of Cowen's second law, but my cursory examination turns up no useful hits in PubMed about FDA credibility. We have the odd op-ed, some drivel about people thinking the FDA is more credible about cigarettes when they learn that FDA regulates cigarette manufacture, and precious little else of remote utility.

Almost as though senior FDA leadership have not bothered, after over a year of pandemic to even commission a rigorous survey of which action(s) the public would view as credible. Certainly what they are doing is not coherent with any of the effective medical communication techniques I was taught nor with any of my training for dealing with public responses to calamity.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe somewhere the FDA dumped a couple of grand into even a Mechanical Turk survey to justify actions that will have billions in cost implications and might lead to the death of thousands of folks (particularly overseas).

I mean, the civil servants at the FDA surely are not just LARPing as pop psychologists, somewhere I've missed they have actual peer reviewed literature guiding any of their moves regarding communication, credibility, and risk management, right?

That is from Sure.  So what is the best piece on FDA credibility?  (Yes, I know the work of Daniel Carpenter and have a CWT with him coming out and we do address this directly.)  And what has the FDA itself done to study the issue of its own credibility/