Which is in itself bizarre. It's as if theses government agencies have been too successful for their own good, and now people have stopped believing in the dangers.
Smallpox - eradicated from the face of the earth (barring lab samples).
Polio - only 50 years ago, there were tens of thousands of cases in the U.S. Ten years later, after a serious vaccination push, it was down to a bit over a hundred cases. 1979 - last indigenous Polio transmission in the U.S. (globally, it just won't die, in large part thanks to the efforts of religious fruit-loops convincing people it's a plot by the U.S. to sterilise them; we pushed it more or less down to a single country, and now heart-breakingly it's spreading from there again).
Whooping cough - beaten down from tens of thousands of deaths to dozens in the U.S., and then cases started rising again when people stopped having their children vaccinated at the start of the 21st century.
The list of diseases that no longer present a real daily threat to people goes on and on. Let's have someone big from the relevant government agency on the news telling people that they're killing children by dodging vaccinations.
On the other hand, the government agencies have had a tendency in some areas to ignore science when it conflicts with industry interests. For instance, food regulation often puts industry profits ahead of sound nutritional and health concerns, and government climate scientists have had a hard time publishing research that confirms global warming.
Given that, I don't think it is that bizarre that people might have developed a general mistrust of these agencies.
You remind me of the incident where President Reagan asked some statistician to work up numbers on how much money could be saved (or some such) if more lead were put into gasoline. He did as he was told but then also looked at the converse: How much it would cost in terms of increased healthcare. Contrary to what Reagan wanted, lead was taken out of gasoline. The statistician basically had to leave the government job he had. I believe he got some kind of award (can't recall if it was a Nobel Prize) that helped him buy a house so he could work as a professor and continue doing research too controversial for government bureaucrats.
FDA/regulatory failures have gone from being common, to being rare. And people are much more scared of rare events than of common events. For example, parents are much more scared of child abductions than they are of car accidents.
"It's as if theses government agencies have been too successful for their own good, and now people have stopped believing in the dangers."
Of course you're conveniently leaving out all of the people who have died from FDA wrongdoing, and government wrongdoing in general.
The fact is that around 1 in 3 Americans die from drug use or drug-related causes. When you put it that way it doesn't sound like the FDA is such a trustworthy agency, does it?
Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking drugs that are necessary to keep them alive. Chemotherapy kills a lot of people, simply because the whole purpose of it is to kill a tumor with poisons. Does that mean that chemo should be banned? Of course not, because people who take chemo drugs are probably going to die if nothing is done.
Likewise, opiates kill a lot of people. But how many people would forgo life-saving surgery because of the pain they would have to live with after the surgery if effective painkillers were illegal? My guess is a lot more than the number of people who are killed by opiates directly.
The duty of the FDA is to make sure that drugs are safe and effective. If they're overpermissive, more people will die of drugs themselves. If they're too restrictive, people won't get the medicine they need to stay alive. It's a tricky balance to strike, and I think the FDA is doing a reasonably good job.
How do you know that few people die from medically necessary drugs? I've been looking for a source of number of deaths by drug, but I can't find one.
Also, I'm fairly confident that drugs being illegal causes fewer people to die from drug use directly.[1] Drug illegality makes drugs more expensive, which makes it more difficult for the average junkie to obtain a lethal dose.
Another big issue is medical errors. This isn't a government problem so much as it's a problem with our health care system. I'm not really sure whether government-run healthcare would improve this (by removing the profit motive to see as many patients as possible) or make it worse, by creating the wrong incentives.
It's really easy to blame the government for everyone's problems, but government regulation often saves lives, even if it ends up indirectly killing some people. For example, if the FDA kills people by prohibiting a potentially life-saving drug for safety reasons, they look really bad. But you don't see the people whose lives were saved because they didn't take a drug that turned out to be severe latent carcinogens.
[1] Of course, drugs being illegal makes more people die from drug-related violence. Violence is probably a worse problem, even if it's less deadly than overdosing, because it can affect nonusers.
Not all of them, but many of them. For example, how many cancer deaths could be avoided each year if the FDA banned the practice of spraying radioactive fertilizer on the tobacco leaves? It's thought that 90% of the cancer caused by tobacco comes from the radiation and not from the tobacco alone, which means that about 135,000 Americans are dying each year because of the FDA's malfeasance.
Smallpox - eradicated from the face of the earth (barring lab samples).
Polio - only 50 years ago, there were tens of thousands of cases in the U.S. Ten years later, after a serious vaccination push, it was down to a bit over a hundred cases. 1979 - last indigenous Polio transmission in the U.S. (globally, it just won't die, in large part thanks to the efforts of religious fruit-loops convincing people it's a plot by the U.S. to sterilise them; we pushed it more or less down to a single country, and now heart-breakingly it's spreading from there again).
Whooping cough - beaten down from tens of thousands of deaths to dozens in the U.S., and then cases started rising again when people stopped having their children vaccinated at the start of the 21st century.
The list of diseases that no longer present a real daily threat to people goes on and on. Let's have someone big from the relevant government agency on the news telling people that they're killing children by dodging vaccinations.