In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, it’s become a regular assumption that we (meaning scientists, healthcare professionals, and science and health communicators) need to communicate uncertainty better. The argument goes that during the pandemic, we made it seem as if we knew everything for certain, and then when things inevitably changed, as they always do during an unfolding mysterious health emergency like COVID, people were left feeling as though they had been lied to.

The example that’s almost always used is masks. At the beginning of the pandemic, health officials told people not to wear them, in part because they were in short supply but also because they thought they wouldn’t help. Over time, we got more information about both COVID transmission and about the efficacy of mask wearing, and everyone changed their tune. Eventually, masks became one of the strongest recommendations for keeping safe and healthy. There was subsequently a good deal of political division about masks and a widespread loss of trust that probably could have been avoided. Wouldn’t it have been better to just tell people from the start that we didn’t know whether they should wear masks? That we were still looking into it?

As the emergency phase of the pandemic slowed down, healthcare and public health professionals started reflecting a lot on what went wrong and what to do about flagging trust in the general population. Much of this conversation has centered around better communication of uncertainty. But in reality, we know very little about how the people currently conceptualize uncertainty in health and medicine, let alone in a pandemic setting.

Healthcare professionals, especially doctors, are trained to think about uncertainty in a very specific way, one that involves careful and sometimes artful inquiry as part of the diagnostic process. The centerpiece of physician training, the diagnostic process, is basically an exercise in uncertainty reduction, as the physician is trained to carefully collect just the necessary amount of information to systematically come to a more certain conclusion. This highly specialized view of and experience with medical and health-related uncertainty may not be the same experience the general public has with the concept.

One suggestion has been general-public campaigns about the extent of uncertainty in science and medicine and how professionals try to manage and lessen such uncertainty. They could go a long way in reducing the gap between health professionals’ and the public’s understanding of uncertainty.

All the same, we may not be able to recommend effective communication about uncertainty in healthcare settings until we truly understand what patients think this means in comparison to healthcare professionals’ understanding. Research on the topic feels urgent, given the extent of distrust that now pervades the health and public health systems.

The NIH announced last fall that they were canceling their science of health communication program. This is more than unfortunate; it is a direct threat to the health and well-being of millions of Americans. We need to use our resources to better communicate about uncertainty, and the time to do that is now.