[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] To, um, everyone for joining.
So, um, we've got some online guests joining us, but I want us to kick off because I think we've got two fantastic, um, speakers today.
And we really excited to delve deeper into the discussion with you.
So just as a context and as a welcome for everybody who's also joining us online,
and this is a master's in translational health Sciences that we offer at Oxford University.
And the group of students that you can see on the camera are in doing their translational sciences and global health module.
Um, earlier today we've been reflecting on how grant funding can shape research priorities.
We've heard about a variety of research methods that can speak to addressing health inequities in different contexts.
How do you translate learning between different contexts?
Um, but one question that came up, um, earlier today as well is how do we make sure the research that is done has impact?
And. Reaches both the ears of policymakers who need to respond, but it also contributes to conversations that are held in public.
And so that's why we're really excited to to welcome two of our speakers today.
So I'll do a very brief introduction. I want to encourage you to and go and read a bit further about their work.
I know the class have have done that in preparation for the discussion that's to follow, but just in brief.
So I Professor David is professor at the University of Edinburgh.
She holds a personal chair in global public health, and she has been a trusted voice during the Covid 19 pandemic in providing
scientific explanations to the public and also in advance to the government.
Um, she's published three books and also writes a column in The Guardian.
Um, welcome. Vivi. Um and Mia Milan um is the founder and editor in chief of the Texas Centre for Health Journalism and based in South Africa.
She's won more than 30 awards for her writing in both print, radio and has recently been doing TV work.
And it's an incredible resource both for the public and for policymakers in South Africa.
So we are delighted to both, both of you, um, to join us today.
So I'm I'll throw the initial question to both of you to get the conversation started, but then I'll hand over to the two of you to to go from there.
Um, so our starting question is why? Why does science communication matter?
Um, and I'll look to you to give your initial thoughts, and then we'll go to Debbie.
Thank you. Um, yeah.
You are still. I mean, we can't hear you yet. Mission.
Is it's easy to get into settings and get them like a.
Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. There we go.
So thanks very much. And Mary, um, so I'm a journalist and I became a journalist in the late 19, 1990s in my country and early 2000.
And during that time, I saw the direct consequences of science communication, because that was the time in South Africa that we had HIV denialism.
We had the highest number of infections in the world,
but we had a president and a health minister who believed the treatment that you use for HIV is poisonous.
So as a result of that, we didn't have three of these in my country.
And during that time, the media and activists and lawyers had to come together and communicate the right science
so that we got to a point where we could force the government to adopt the right policies.
And, you know, it was so ironic. Uh, president at the time, top Mbeki, he spokesperson, had HIV and didn't use IRBs as a result.
And he died. He died without the treatment.
And during that time,
it showed me that if you can use the media to really make or break whether people take up treatment or an intervention that's available.
And we saw that during Covid as well. We saw, you know, whether people used vaccines, whether they used masks,
whether they adhere to lockdown regulations or whether they took up unproven treatments like ivermectin.
Science communication played a really, really important role around that.
And I think today we see things like, you know, in the late 80s and early 90s in in the UK,
we had the MMR vaccine, um, communication that was very important and people not wanting to use the vaccine.
We see those things emerging again. If we don't have the right science communication.
We see in the UK and the US, measles rates increasing.
And it's so important that people in the news media where I work,
but also science scientists themselves, when they um, used to write, um, the media for communication.
But if we don't do effective communication and by that I don't just mean distribute the right information if we don't do it in an appealing way,
way people are attracted to that information and a simple way and also a compelling way,
then that could play a significant role in whether people take up treatment that's available,
whether they take the right prevention or whether they even know of treatments that's available.
So should I respond now? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me.
And that was a brilliant answer. Maya. Um, I guess we all reflect on why I decided to get into science communication,
which is that I think you realise when you see another study published that exercise improves longevity,
or you see another study that, you know, there's a vaccine like the MMR vaccine or the HPV vaccine is effective.
You know, you start to wonder, do we need more studies and more and more research?
Or actually, is there a gap in that reaching people in the general public?
And during Covid, this became clear because I was sitting on expert panels and, you know,
at some point there'd be this we need to tell the public or the public needs to know.
And and I was like, who's the public and who's going to go tell them and who's going to go do that?
Because it's a very uncomfortable position.
As someone who's an academic, you're used to being in, you know, Oxford's where the ivory tower came from, right?
You're used to being in an ivory tower and you're talking to like minded individuals.
You know, everyone's listening and, you know, keen to hear about different perspectives.
And all of a sudden you're out in, you know.
In a public forum where people have a lot of different interests, different opinions, and it's very, very difficult.
And I think are what became clear to me during the pandemic.
But I was doing it even before then, was that how do we get the information the experts know?
And at the very start in Britain, this was around the risks of Covid, how it was spreading,
the hospitalisation rate, um, the age profile, chronic disease profile.
How do we get that out so that everybody has access to that same information?
And how do we do it in a way that people actually want to engage with it and listen?
And it's a bit challenging at times. You have to be very, very simple and I guess we'll come to that.
But I think for me, so many like, do we need another study on, you know, very obvious things in public health.
The part of me is like, maybe not. What we actually need is to have more people out there engaging in this.
And I think now probably the gap in on here between what we know and the research and the expertise that you have
in the number of studies and what I would say the general public knowledge of an issue has never been greater.
And it's not because of not enough information, it's actually too much information.
You go online and you follow a fitness influencer who says you can get a six pack in a week.
I'm going to tell you how. And then you follow someone else who's like, take the supplement and you know you'll live to 120.
And so it's almost too much information. So in that the role science communication is almost a cut through that.
And actually, Leonard, what I would say is kind of independent, credible information in a space that's very unregulated and chaotic.
So yeah. Go ahead. Mia. I so agree with what you said now.
Um, but it's so complex or so difficult sometimes to simplify information.
And, you know, how do you manage that balance between simplifying but not losing the nuances that are important?
How do you decide when to lose the nuance, you know, in an exchange for simplicity?
And what are the consequences, especially if you're, for instance, in a live television interview and you have to do it on the spot.
It's very, very tricky. Um, even today, if you guys go on the Guardian website, I have a new column out on the smoking ban in the UK,
and this is me trying to put into 700 words the UK's approach to smoking and tobacco,
why the bans brought in, why it's important, what it does, what it doesn't do.
Take on the philosophical arguments about regulation and the nanny state overreach of our lives,
and do it in a way that people actually want to read it and engage with it,
and don't move on to the next article, which is why you shouldn't go skiing in the Alps or something.
Right. So this is the challenge of doing it.
And then obviously you do it and someone's going to come back and say, you didn't include this or you didn't include that,
or they're going to come back and say, actually, that was inaccurate.
How you phrase that and you're like, I'm trying to do that.
It's TV interviews in some ways are even harder.
You have, um, 30s. I did a lot of breakfast TV in the past, and it's like one panel I was on.
It was like Pamela Anderson, who is promoting like a new movie.
Then there's like me talking about some public health intervention,
and then you have like Piers Morgan, who at some point might go on a rant about Meghan Markle.
So you're like in the middle of that and then you're like, okay, I've got 30s to make a clear point and you do get criticised.
So, for example, during Covid, I made, someone was saying to me like, oh, how do you get SARS-CoV-2?
And so I said, well, I would think of it like smoke, right?
So if you could smell a cigarette across a room, you probably could get Covid.
And that became very heavily criticised because people are like, no, it's not airborne and it's not like smoke,
and you've just misled the public because actually it doesn't travel across a room.
And I'm like, but that's the nearest analogy people can get right?
Which is like, you're sitting on a in a room, like the room you're in.
That's on her. And I said. I think David was friends with you.
Please rise and let's, um. Let's give her a few seconds to just and unfreeze.
It's always a pity if you freeze in a moment and then your thought has progressed 30s to two minutes later.
Um, hopefully she can. She can hear us and.
But me. In the meantime, do you think you want to share? So to David?
Sort of. Yeah. Thanks for tease of why the community communique during the Covid 19 pandemic.
Uh, yeah. What was your experiences during that time?
I think the one thing that that Debbie raised, now that, you know, it's almost it's important to be accurate, obviously, but.
To package information in a way that the general public finds it appealing and, you know, can absorb it.
It's almost a more advanced skill. And she raised the point now that that, you know, she used analogies, which I think I had her back TV.
I'm sorry my teams crashed. I am.
William Mary asked me to just pick up while you were away about, you know, what are the complexities that I've experienced?
And I just got to the point where you mentioned analogies.
Analogies makes it so much easier to understand things.
But it's also and when you simplify it, you can you can land up in so much trouble and um,
something that, for instance, in South Africa at the moment,
the big thing in our public health world is that we getting a HIV prevention injection, that if you HIV negative,
you can take it once every six months and you won't get you highly unlikely to contract HIV.
But it gets confused so very often with a vaccine, for instance, and having to explain that to to an audience.
But an example is that we have a very credible scientist.
And I did a story about this, um, medication that you can use.
It's caught in a cup of beer. And she wanted to use that analogy, and she said, it's like a chemical condom.
It's like a chemical condom that you take and you won't get HIV.
And I got contacted by, you know, donors who sponsor it and, um, very upset saying,
you can't say it's a chemical condom because, um, really, it's like a lung thing.
Medication. You can't really compare it to a condom.
And to me, that explanation made it so easy to understand.
And. Yet there were so many people who were unhappy about it, and I want that you did.
Um, Debbie, you mentioned that you used that analogy and, you know, it became so complex when you used it.
What are your experience about that further?
I think it's really hard because when you do science communication, there's always someone who's unhappy in general.
Like, I remember making a joke, um, when I was doing, like, a festival talk and I was saying about cruise ships,
I don't know if some of you remember during the Covid pandemic,
the Diamond Princess cruise ship where a lot of people were infected on it and it spread around,
and I use it as a case study of how difficult it was to manage,
because they didn't want to take everybody off the ship because then you could spread it further.
But then if you keep everyone on the ship or you imprisoning people. And so they were in this terrible conundrum.
And I just made a joke that, you know,
cruise ships are terrible for like public health or public health perspective because so many things spread on them.
So like, don't go on cruises.
And it was just a quip and it's kind of my personality as well, just to kind of I've received so many emails from cruise lobby,
like cruise ship lobbying companies saying that like I had said something terrible and could I back it up and I shouldn't be making these comments.
And, um, and so it's really hard because I don't like being so filtered because then it feels like you're writing an academic article.
And I always say, I never write an academic card, although you might, I think you could make the argument about infection control on cruise ships.
Um, but I think you get ready. Someone will be, um, unhappy with what you say.
And so I guess my take is like, I kind of always think of, like, the dinner table conversation.
And I'm curious me if this is similar. Kind of.
I know you teach workshops on this, but, uh, when I'm talking to, like, my PhD students or others or those are going to go to radio,
I'm like, imagine you're sitting next to, like, your mom or a friend or a sibling, and they're like, explain this to me.
And, you know, you could probably have their attention for about like, 30s before they drift or ever like, oh, what's next to eat?
So you kind of like, how do I say this to them that they understand what I'm talking about, and I just include what's relevant?
And that's the approach I do with simplicity. And you do I think to me accuracy is important.
So it's that you have to be simplistic but accurate, but you do lose complexity in that and the nuances and all that.
So coming back to like the piece today I've done on tobacco,
I couldn't go into the history of tobacco control and the different interventions and the evidence base for ease and,
you know, illicit tobacco and what happens when you ban stuff in the underground.
I just had to do a piece that someone asked me, what is this legislation about?
What does it do? And what do you think I would say about?
And that's how I tried to write it. So in my head I work it out and then I just write it.
And then at that point you got to stop reading the comments, because I think today I made the mistake of looking and there's 300 comments,
and the bulk of them are like antiphon, and she's trying to take away more things than us, largely from non-smokers, which is really interesting.
A lot of the smokers are like really happy that legislation is being brought in because,
you know, they do feel that tobacco companies have kind of gotten away with quite, quite a lot.
Um, so just don't read the comments as well. Or if you do keep a kind of I feel like I should probably get on my door antiphon
public health professor so people can kind of you got to keep the lightness to it,
I guess. And yeah, I guess the challenge I face and I wanted to ask your opinion was around misinformation.
That, like I don't have a good answer for it.
Like, what do we do now with the internet and everything else going on and social media?
How do you tackle this in a sense of what are you trying to teach your science communicators about what they should be doing?
I think the challenge is that with social media.
Misinformation spreads faster than the accurate information because it's generally more appealing.
It's emotional. It's there are there are things that drive it.
And. If I think back, say, during our HIV denialism period in South Africa,
if someone was going to respond to an HIV story with the right information that you did,
they're going to have to either cite on radio or they were going to have to publish an update and mention your article.
It took time to respond, but today you can respond immediately if you, uh, a person was spreading misinformation.
So when we talk about tackling it, the one thing is that we should not stay away from social media.
I think we should.
I believe we should use exactly the same channels that people who spread misinformation use to spread that information to tackle it and,
and, and have the right information. Of course, you're not going to respond.
The golden rule is then respond to the people directly. It never ends in anything constructively.
But what was it like during Covid where such a site to Twitter was very, very popular during Covid, which really did help was we used,
ironically, the information that, um, anti-vaxxers, for instance, spread excuse as to when to do stories about certain things.
So we would never quote them or we would never, um, you know, mention what they say, but we would use it as a keyword.
An example would be, say, if there were lots of messages about ivermectin, you know that it can kill you or prevent you from getting Covid.
We would use that as a cue to start doing. Stories about why humans can't just use animal medicine.
Um, or, you know, what's the difference between a viral disease and a parasitic disease?
Or if they are lots of tweets all of a sudden about same heart related side effects of, uh, Covid vaccine?
We would start doing stories about what's the difference between a rare side effect and a common side effect.
And it actually resulted in in very good uptake because it was it gave us an indication of what's going around at that time.
But what I find very hard, what I find much harder to address than outright misinformation,
is that today there's so many things going around that there's a lot of write in what the message says and just 1 or 2 things wrong in it,
or I find it hard to address, say, academic polarisations, for instance,
during Covid in my country, and I'm sure and in many other countries,
there were a lot of really big fights between scientists as to should we have lockdowns or shouldn't be,
or should we get a certain type of vaccine in South Africa, there was such a big argument about should we get the AstraZeneca vaccine or not?
And the story was around, we could get AstraZeneca much faster,
but we had a variant in the country that AstraZeneca didn't seem to work for at the time.
And there was major one major arguments among scientists in the committee about whether we should get it or not, and we didn't get it.
But what it resulted in was, if you get then say, for instance, of radio or television stations to amplify those messages,
they don't necessarily know about the politics between academics.
They basically take the person on air who is the most available, who is the most willing to come on.
And, you know, it's the difference between who's willing to come on a ten at night and who and not.
And in that way, I sometimes felt that a lot of misinformation was actually spread by scientists themselves, because we're the scientists.
Sometimes that will take a health economist to tell you how a vaccine works or, you know, a doctor and especially healthy.
That is not necessarily a person who can speak about vaccines.
And that's I find almost that competition for attention during a pandemic I found almost harder to address than the direct misinformation.
That's just really wrong. How did you experience that?
As someone who was a scientists who was contacted, and how did you feel when you saw someone that, you know, novelist and you know,
someone who shouldn't be speaking about a certain thing, and there they are, because they available and that on set they phone.
Yeah, it's really tricky, I guess. Also, when I feel like sometimes like they're being asked questions that I found, for example, a bit silly.
So when I give an example in Britain was around masks. Right.
I think there's a really valid public debate over when do you implement mandatory masks and where and in which age groups.
And that's a very nuanced discussion, because in general, people don't like wearing masks.
And also in children, you know, they could be considered a more, you know, heavy intervention than an adult's.
Right. What you instead got, instead of a kind of a nuanced public debate, was do masks work?
So I found this really bizarre because I would be sitting on panels and people would be like, do masks work?
And I'm like, of course they work. We use them in surgical settings.
We use them in, you know,
infectious disease control for a long time is do you really want to be sticking these on every single member of the population?
Because they have to we're putting them on kids in nurseries or making them in shops or transport or just in hospitals.
And so I think what kind of got me was sometimes like the question being asked was not the right one,
and what you'd instead have is coming back to me, to your point, like a scientist on saying like, I don't think masks work.
And I feel like, no, you should be saying I don't like masks.
And therefore I think it's a disproportionate intervention compared to the risk of Covid similar with lockdowns.
You know, the number of lockdowns don't work. I'm like, how can a lockdown not work?
You basically take people, you imprison them in their home and they can't see anybody's.
You reduce their number of social contacts. Is it a proportional thing to do is a completely different question, right.
Because it has harms as has been discussed.
So that's a discussion over do the harms of a lockdown are they outweighed by the benefits of reducing social contact.
Instead they were like oh, lockdowns don't work. And I'm like how can it not work?
That's just a silly debate to be having. You get dragged into these and you see people on TV having them.
And I totally feel but you felt me because sometimes you would see that, you know, that if you didn't go on a radio show,
someone would be on and they'd be saying something and you'd be like, why are they talking about that?
That makes no sense.
So you feel like you needed to be the one to do it, but to be always available to do these kind of things is quite it's quite difficult.
I mean, I did the want to pick up on the issue of social media and clickbait, um, because I thought about this a lot.
Um, and this relates generally, I'd say, to public health, not even tied to anything related to the pandemic.
Which is the algorithms prefer content.
That is outrageous. That is what sells.
That is what gets clicks and others. And that's the financial model, because what gets clicked on gets more views, gets advertising revenue.
And therefore. So for example, all you got to do is take a podcast, take diary of a CEO.
Some of you might have listen to this at the start.
The podcast was actually quite reasonable and had guests on who had kind of really interesting balanced views.
But if you look at the evolution of the podcast, they started taking on more and more radical views and views.
I would consider sometimes not factually accurate.
But those views, those guests and those podcasts sometimes got the most clicks and the most traffic.
And a podcast model is advertisers are paying for that podcast.
So if you are a producer or booking gas or you're looking at it, you're looking at who will generate the most attention.
And often what is the most attention is saying something outrageous.
And it is really difficult as an academic, because if you look at the most successful, take a book on Covid,
the most successful book on Covid in terms of sales is the one by RFK Jr,
which is like basically the Covid conspiracy, Fauci and everything else, right?
There's not a lot of, I would say, facts in it. Right.
It's a tirade about like how it's manmade. Fauci's implicated and so on and why vaccines don't work.
In terms of book sales? Hands down.
I mean, it's sold. There were so many other Covid books that came out.
Um, I wrote one. Plenty of people wrote one, which is kind of different academic takes on it, journalistic takes.
It didn't generate the same kind of interest as that did, to the point that I almost was like, you know,
joking that if I wanted to have written a bestseller, I could have written the Covid conspiracy or the hoax of Covid and why it wasn't real.
And that probably would have had the most sales, because that's would have generated outrage.
So I really struggle with this because I know that now, you know, recommendation me is that,
you know, we should go on to social media, we should go on to these platforms.
And but I'm kind of a bit like if we go on to the platforms and we play by their game,
which is the algorithms and trying to generate interest, it kind of goes against what I think is kind of.
Academic experience. And for me, even when I do public engagement and science communication, my main thing is like, do I keep my academic reputation?
Will a public health academic sitting in Oxford or sitting in London look at my work and say, that's accurate.
She's she she she deserves her professor title because what she's saying is actually accurate to the evidence.
And I think unfortunately, it's a very slippery slope when you start going into the world of likes, followers, attention, popularity,
and all of a sudden you're like, I might have said something really crazy and it gets millions and millions of likes, but it's not accurate.
Then you're popular and then you have a base.
And so there I think it's I and I just think, for example, like this last example and me, I'm curious to hear what what you think on it is.
Take Russell Brand or it's another kind of, you know, academic, I think, you know, who tried to get a constantly trying to get attention.
The academic was putting up YouTube videos, 50 views, 100 views.
Kept trying to get attention like I could see him posting. And I was thinking, it's not getting the traction.
And then he comes out and he he starts taking like what I would say contrarian positions.
Vaccines don't work.
More people have died by vaccines and saved by vaccines, which again, I don't have any evidence base you can say about vaccinations.
I think you can acknowledge their side effects. There's vaccine related injuries. Do we have to vaccinate as much as we vaccinate?
Those are all appropriate debates. Do vaccines have they killed more people than health?
I think is not really a fair. His videos now millions of years.
So if your metric of success is popularity and views and likes and clicks, and I know you'll all feel it if you're on social media,
right, you post something and you're looking how many people have watched, maybe you're not.
I mean, how many people have liked it or how many people have engaged with it.
It becomes the incentive structure gets skewed for science communication.
So that'd be like my only word of warning about about that, um,
having having seen these platforms and how they work and how various academics have tried to engage with them.
I don't know if you agree with that. Me or you think I'm being too harsh. No, I think you've got a point.
But I think it's complex. I think if you look at the news media and increasingly the social platforms are becoming part of the news media, right?
You no longer just write the story on a website. You also do an Instagram reel, that sort of thing.
If you look at it and you look at research as to where do people get the information from?
And let's look at the news, information, data. And let's assume like science communication is part of that.
Then the fastest growing channels on my side of the world in in my country, South Africa, news channels, how people access news.
The fastest growing channels um, channel is TikTok in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.
And do then say that you're not going to use TikTok.
Um, you know, because they are a different set of rules, which is true.
If you put something out in a news stream, it goes through certain controls, you know,
through a news editor, through a subeditor before it's published, and social media, the rules are gone.
You can put out whatever you want, and your reach depends on these algorithms, but also the number of followers that you have.
So you can make the most insane comments that you want.
If you've got a million followers, you can reach more people than you, than the person who has the right information.
Like you and I could be in an equally compelling form.
They're not going to reach as many people as you. That's a very complex thing.
And it's also, if you're a science communicator, what skills do you try to have if that's the platforms where you need to put things out?
And shouldn't you get the skills to know how to make it Instagram reel or a TikTok reel that if you reach the people again,
what you're saying is, you know. If you simplify the information and it's not a live interview, it's something that you can view over and over.
Um, are people going to start to criticise your peers and that sort of thing?
I'm not sure we have that luxury to say that we're not going to do it, because that is where it's going.
And look, in five years from now, it might not be Tik-Tok, it might be some new platform that's emerged.
The other challenge about it is it's so time consuming.
You can't possibly, as an academic who's doing research, go and compile these reels all the time.
And we do it at my organisation, because you do have to adjust to, you know, how the media works.
But we a small organisation and I can tell you if you want to put out a good Instagram reel for news,
it takes you three four hours to to to produce it because you can't just talk.
You need pictures over it, that sort of thing.
So I don't have a clear answer for you, but what I can say is when I look at uptake and where do our stories go,
which is only health research stories and policy stories,
the uptake very much depends on whether we put it out on the right forums, so we can have a story or a TV interview.
Amplification of stories matter. I guess that's what I want to say.
So if you, for instance, want to reach policymakers, you can no longer just be online or just be on social media or just be on TV.
You need to try and get your story amplified as much as you can.
And that Tik-Tok fast is grabbing news source there.
The study that was done, the age ranges were between 15 and 35.
It wasn't 15 and 16. You know the kind of person who takes it up with Instagram Reels, for instance.
It's becoming older.
And if I look at myself, I get about a third of my news and I'm a I'm someone interesting and interested in policy things from Instagram Reels,
you know, from social media, I, I very rarely directly go to a website or YouTube.
YouTube, you know, I go to tell if you were interviewed, I will go and look for the video or another scientist and try and review it.
But increasingly, if you, for instance, look at, say, television stations, they're starting to get their reporters to do to do Instagram,
not like a repetition of what was on air, but to do a different version, because that is how people consume information now.
So no clear answer. But I do think it would it would be dangerous to say that we'll never do that.
Maybe the solution lies in finding funds to appoint a person to package these things, just like politicians for you, and you just review it.
But. I do think we need to.
If we want the right information to reach people, we do need to use the platforms that they use to get that information.
Yeah, that's a really important point me in. It's one I really struggle with because I think that there is pure science communication.
So I had a student come see me recently who said she's undergraduate medical student and said, I want to do science communication.
What's your advice? And I said, well, either you can like, you know, do your masters, do your PhD,
establish an academic career, and then from that branch out into being asked this,
I said, or you can set up a TikTok account, make it really fun and put out videos and get hundreds of thousands of followers.
And guess what? You're a science communicator. And she looked at me and I said, yeah, I'm not on ice, Samia.
Honestly, I'm not on TikTok.
I feel like the skills I would need to be on it, which probably include dance and other kind of kind of things I just don't have,
and maybe I'm also like old school in the sense of maybe, maybe our generation needs to kind of slowly move out of the way for the new generation.
I mean, I was a student at Oxford, you know, and I went through a very academic path of like learning the jargon.
I remember being in Oxford for the first few months. I just come off, you know, from from Miami,
Oxford dad difference Miami's you can get and people were having conversations
and I doing seminars and I had like no idea what people are talking about.
Like I would sit in a seminar for half an hour. At the end of it, I'd be like, I couldn't tell you what that was about.
Like, I must be really dumb. And one of my, you know, friends in the class, he said to me, no, no, no, what you gotta do is translate.
It's a different language. So every time they take a sentence like, translate it to like what you think it means.
So I started almost like a different language, starting to translate.
And then I learned that language that I translated back to become an academic, so I could give a seminar and speak in that language.
And then so for me, kind of the route I've taken into science communication perhaps is very different to the world we need now,
because I went into it like becoming an academic, doing my grants,
getting my academic credibility, and then branching out into science communication on the side.
And I guess it comes me to that, what I want to speak about, which is some of the risks of doing it.
Because when you do go on these platforms, you can get a lot of comments.
And it's one thing to get comments on my Guardian piece, which is like,
you're anti-foreign or why should we ban tobacco or whatever, which don't hit that hard in some ways, right?
I can kind of laugh them off and get comments on a on a reel, which is like your horrible, very personal comments about your appearance or about,
you know, whatever it is as a, as a woman, you get more on those kind of things and all of a sudden it can be really depressing.
If you've built a scientific career based on your brain and based on your knowledge and based on your competence.
So all of a sudden, be someone like, you know, and excuse my language, like, I don't like this dumb [INAUDIBLE], right?
Like that's the kind of stuff you get on Instagram. Sorry for on break.
It breached Oxford language things that I was doing it in quotations.
So it's not me saying it's a, it's a quote. Um, and there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of that of like you're put yourself out.
I remember I did, you know a good Morning Britain over about Covid and someone like a really big
account with like millions of followers take a picture of me and was like,
who's this? Who's this bird waffling on all the time?
Which again, if you don't know, like bird is quite a demeaning word for like a women.
And when you're up there speaking about like an expert topic. So I was like, why am I doing this?
Like, well, why? Because in academia, I mean, I guess this is a challenge for you.
There is not much appreciation for public engagement. You'll probably have failed this in Oxford, right?
You need to do really well at your exams. You need to get your grants and you need to get your publications.
You need to have peer review of your work. Right. You need to establish credibility.
And where does science communication fit in there.
So I guess yeah, I guess a two things I want to raise is one of the risks of doing it and going into these platforms.
But also how do you engage academics? You feel like that's not my core work.
I'm doing this on top, and why should I be doing it, given it's not really the rules of academia, which are much different.
I guess, you know, when we have scientists that we often do media training with,
the argument I often try to use is if you want your science to go some way to be used in politics,
people need to know about it because science is pretty useless, right?
If it if it's not translated into policies, how would it then?
Not useless, but, you know,
meaningless in terms of how it would change our daily lives if it can be used by people that the findings that people have.
And once they realise that if they communicate more regularly, even if they use the skills that they gained, not necessarily in a media story,
but in the way that they would communicate, say, in a meeting with government officials or other key players,
then the light seems to go on for them a little bit.
But I agree with you that scientists, the time consuming nature of.
Engaging with the public is a big barrier for for academics because their real job is something else.
However. I have seen quite a few signs, increasingly.
Signs. Organisations raising funds to appoint journalists with science communicator right there at the organisation.
That that definitely helps. Well having their own communications department almost.
And not just people who issue press releases, but to actually do stories about their own work that they put on their website.
And that is then often consumed by the media.
The thing about the media is we've lost, uh, economic model with online.
We no longer get the advertising that we need to survive.
So increasingly you have newsrooms that are really,
really under resourced and now increasingly open to using stories like that in
their own publications where they would never have considered doing that ten,
15 years ago. So I do think that starting to invest in, uh.
Storytelling or communications department at my academic institution or a NGO.
Really does pay off because that helps with.
Like making the burden lighter on academics themselves to do these things.
Um. I do think that, you know, we.
When science and policy comes together and when communication helps with that, there is if you can see the impact of that it.
Does help to make a bigger investment in science communication.
I think if I think during Covid, for instance, you know, that the thing that's most vivid in my mind is the Omicron travel bans.
Remember when I made the Omicron variant was detected in South Africa and in Botswana, and it's all scientists who, um, discovered it essentially.
And then all of a sudden a week later,
they would travel bans against us completely based on no science saying if that variant is, yeah, we can't travel anywhere.
And the worst thing was. They told South Africans they required PCR tests to be tested for Covid.
Now these are tests we've had for ever long before Covid because we got such high rates of HIV, and they told us specifically Canada,
that if we wanted to travel, we needed to test the PCR test and the test wasn't allowed to be done in South Africa,
it had to be sent away to a third country. And.
All scientists really rallied and the media rallied and really communicated.
How unscientific this was, but how the virus was basically being racialized.
If you come from Africa, your. John infection needed different rules from someone who was elsewhere,
and we saw policies change because of that rallying and because of that communication.
I remember advocacy, so that was by no one, no means just us.
We changed this. It was of scientists, everyone together. But we wrote an op ed about it.
And it was it travelled fast.
It travelled right up to the World Health Organisation and the meeting that we had, they had the Civil Society Forum co-edited,
and this Canadian Health Commission in South Africa took it up, had a meeting with a um in country.
Well, they team in Canada and quoted from the op ed.
So I do think that.
We shouldn't underestimate what quick action, what lots of resources putting into a certain issue can do to really change policy as well.
And I think when that happens, we start to allocate a little bit more resources to it.
Um, but it's uh. It's a complex thing.
I know academics, if I'm an academic, I would want to get my research published right.
But if it gets published and no one knows about it and policymakers don't know about it, then.
Then it doesn't do what it essentially could ultimately do.
How do you how do you find that? How do you balance your time when it comes to.
How many TV interviews are you going to do compared to how many research articles that you going to get published?
It's very tricky, I think.
I mean, if I put aside kind of the Covid period, which I think was an emergency phase, I think, you know, I'm usually in my day job.
I lead a master's in public health. I have to teach and supervise students.
I've got to get my research done. I'm working on a grant application.
And so I will pick up interview or radio or things if I feel like it's important.
As you said, there's something that needs to be said, but also if it's kind of directly aligned, something I'm working on.
Um, but I would say probably right now through the university press office,
I decline probably 90% to 95% of the stuff that I'm getting in just because I just don't have bandwidth for it unless I feel it's really important.
There was an exception made during Covid because it was a life threatening emergency.
It wasn't a situation where I felt like we needed to get information out.
Surprisingly, that time balance changed.
Um, but I'm aware of time and that we have a class full of of of of of students who maybe want to ask questions or offer their thoughts on this.
So, um, should I stop there and then we open it up to the class?
Yeah, I think thanks. Um, Fabian, thank you for sharing your insight that it was a fascinating conversation for us to to to hear.