ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
The political polarization of COVID-19 treatments among physicians and laypeople in the United States.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
- Barriers to Adopting Evidence From Bayesian Adaptive Clinical Trials in Critical Care: A Randomized Experiment With US Intensivists.CHEST critical care · 2026Article
- Of Issue Advocates and Honest Brokers: Participation of U.S. and German scientists in COVID-19 policy disputes.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2026Article
- Understanding Provider-Level Variation in Clinical Practice: A Longitudinal Survey of Corticosteroid Use in Septic Shock.CHEST critical care · 2025Article
- Nurses' attitudes about RSV vaccination for pregnant women and infants: Evidence from a cross-sectional survey.PloS one · 2025Article
- Political polarization and health.Nature medicine · 2024Review
- Evaluating the Influence of Role-Playing Prompts on ChatGPT's Misinformation Detection Accuracy: Quantitative Study.JMIR infodemiology · 2024Article
- The politics of COVID-19: Differences between U.S. red and blue states in COVID-19 regulations and deaths.Health policy OPEN · 2023Article
- Misinformation, Trust, and Use of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.JAMA health forum · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In the United States, liberals and conservatives disagree about facts. To what extent does expertise attenuate these disagreements? To study this question, we compare the polarization of beliefs about COVID-19 treatments among laypeople and critical care physicians. We find that political ideology predicts both groups' beliefs about a range of COVID-19 treatments. These associations persist after controlling for a rich set of covariates, including local politics. We study two potential explanations: a) that partisans are exposed to different information and b) that they interpret the same information in different ways, finding evidence for both. Polarization is driven by preferences for partisan cable news but not by exposure to scientific research. Using a set of embedded experiments, we demonstrate that partisans perceive scientific evidence differently when it pertains to a politicized treatment (ivermectin), relative to when the treatment is not identified. These results highlight the extent to which political ideology is increasingly relevant for understanding beliefs, even among expert decision makers such as physicians.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.