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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
To, um, everyone for joining.

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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.

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And we really excited to delve deeper into the discussion with you.

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So just as a context and as a welcome for everybody who's also joining us online,

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and this is a master's in translational health Sciences that we offer at Oxford University.

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And the group of students that you can see on the camera are in doing their translational sciences and global health module.

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Um, earlier today we've been reflecting on how grant funding can shape research priorities.

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We've heard about a variety of research methods that can speak to addressing health inequities in different contexts.

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How do you translate learning between different contexts?

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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?

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And. Reaches both the ears of policymakers who need to respond, but it also contributes to conversations that are held in public.

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And so that's why we're really excited to to welcome two of our speakers today.

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So I'll do a very brief introduction. I want to encourage you to and go and read a bit further about their work.

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I know the class have have done that in preparation for the discussion that's to follow, but just in brief.

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So I Professor David is professor at the University of Edinburgh.

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She holds a personal chair in global public health, and she has been a trusted voice during the Covid 19 pandemic in providing

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scientific explanations to the public and also in advance to the government.

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Um, she's published three books and also writes a column in The Guardian.

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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.

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She's won more than 30 awards for her writing in both print, radio and has recently been doing TV work.

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And it's an incredible resource both for the public and for policymakers in South Africa.

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So we are delighted to both, both of you, um, to join us today.

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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.

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Um, so our starting question is why? Why does science communication matter?

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Um, and I'll look to you to give your initial thoughts, and then we'll go to Debbie.

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Thank you. Um, yeah.

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You are still. I mean, we can't hear you yet. Mission.

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Is it's easy to get into settings and get them like a.

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Yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah. There we go.

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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.

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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.

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We had the highest number of infections in the world,

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but we had a president and a health minister who believed the treatment that you use for HIV is poisonous.

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So as a result of that, we didn't have three of these in my country.

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And during that time, the media and activists and lawyers had to come together and communicate the right science

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so that we got to a point where we could force the government to adopt the right policies.

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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.

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And he died. He died without the treatment.

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And during that time,

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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.

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And we saw that during Covid as well. We saw, you know, whether people used vaccines, whether they used masks,

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whether they adhere to lockdown regulations or whether they took up unproven treatments like ivermectin.

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Science communication played a really, really important role around that.

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And I think today we see things like, you know, in the late 80s and early 90s in in the UK,

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we had the MMR vaccine, um, communication that was very important and people not wanting to use the vaccine.

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We see those things emerging again. If we don't have the right science communication.

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We see in the UK and the US, measles rates increasing.

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And it's so important that people in the news media where I work,

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but also science scientists themselves, when they um, used to write, um, the media for communication.

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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,

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way people are attracted to that information and a simple way and also a compelling way,

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then that could play a significant role in whether people take up treatment that's available,

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whether they take the right prevention or whether they even know of treatments that's available.

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So should I respond now? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me.

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And that was a brilliant answer. Maya. Um, I guess we all reflect on why I decided to get into science communication,

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which is that I think you realise when you see another study published that exercise improves longevity,

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or you see another study that, you know, there's a vaccine like the MMR vaccine or the HPV vaccine is effective.

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You know, you start to wonder, do we need more studies and more and more research?

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Or actually, is there a gap in that reaching people in the general public?

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And during Covid, this became clear because I was sitting on expert panels and, you know,

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at some point there'd be this we need to tell the public or the public needs to know.

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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?

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Because it's a very uncomfortable position.

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As someone who's an academic, you're used to being in, you know, Oxford's where the ivory tower came from, right?

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You're used to being in an ivory tower and you're talking to like minded individuals.

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You know, everyone's listening and, you know, keen to hear about different perspectives.

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And all of a sudden you're out in, you know.

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In a public forum where people have a lot of different interests, different opinions, and it's very, very difficult.

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And I think are what became clear to me during the pandemic.

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But I was doing it even before then, was that how do we get the information the experts know?

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And at the very start in Britain, this was around the risks of Covid, how it was spreading,

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the hospitalisation rate, um, the age profile, chronic disease profile.

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How do we get that out so that everybody has access to that same information?

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And how do we do it in a way that people actually want to engage with it and listen?

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And it's a bit challenging at times. You have to be very, very simple and I guess we'll come to that.

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But I think for me, so many like, do we need another study on, you know, very obvious things in public health.

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The part of me is like, maybe not. What we actually need is to have more people out there engaging in this.

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And I think now probably the gap in on here between what we know and the research and the expertise that you have

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in the number of studies and what I would say the general public knowledge of an issue has never been greater.

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And it's not because of not enough information, it's actually too much information.

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You go online and you follow a fitness influencer who says you can get a six pack in a week.

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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.

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And so it's almost too much information. So in that the role science communication is almost a cut through that.

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And actually, Leonard, what I would say is kind of independent, credible information in a space that's very unregulated and chaotic.

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So yeah. Go ahead. Mia. I so agree with what you said now.

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Um, but it's so complex or so difficult sometimes to simplify information.

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And, you know, how do you manage that balance between simplifying but not losing the nuances that are important?

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How do you decide when to lose the nuance, you know, in an exchange for simplicity?

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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.

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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,

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and this is me trying to put into 700 words the UK's approach to smoking and tobacco,

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why the bans brought in, why it's important, what it does, what it doesn't do.

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Take on the philosophical arguments about regulation and the nanny state overreach of our lives,

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and do it in a way that people actually want to read it and engage with it,

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and don't move on to the next article, which is why you shouldn't go skiing in the Alps or something.

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Right. So this is the challenge of doing it.

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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,

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or they're going to come back and say, actually, that was inaccurate.

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How you phrase that and you're like, I'm trying to do that.

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It's TV interviews in some ways are even harder.

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You have, um, 30s. I did a lot of breakfast TV in the past, and it's like one panel I was on.

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It was like Pamela Anderson, who is promoting like a new movie.

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Then there's like me talking about some public health intervention,

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and then you have like Piers Morgan, who at some point might go on a rant about Meghan Markle.

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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.

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So, for example, during Covid, I made, someone was saying to me like, oh, how do you get SARS-CoV-2?

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And so I said, well, I would think of it like smoke, right?

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So if you could smell a cigarette across a room, you probably could get Covid.

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And that became very heavily criticised because people are like, no, it's not airborne and it's not like smoke,

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and you've just misled the public because actually it doesn't travel across a room.

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And I'm like, but that's the nearest analogy people can get right?

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Which is like, you're sitting on a in a room, like the room you're in.

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That's on her. And I said. I think David was friends with you.

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Please rise and let's, um. Let's give her a few seconds to just and unfreeze.

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It's always a pity if you freeze in a moment and then your thought has progressed 30s to two minutes later.

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Um, hopefully she can. She can hear us and.

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But me. In the meantime, do you think you want to share? So to David?

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Sort of. Yeah. Thanks for tease of why the community communique during the Covid 19 pandemic.

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Uh, yeah. What was your experiences during that time?

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I think the one thing that that Debbie raised, now that, you know, it's almost it's important to be accurate, obviously, but.

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To package information in a way that the general public finds it appealing and, you know, can absorb it.

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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.

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I'm sorry my teams crashed. I am.

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William Mary asked me to just pick up while you were away about, you know, what are the complexities that I've experienced?

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And I just got to the point where you mentioned analogies.

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Analogies makes it so much easier to understand things.

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But it's also and when you simplify it, you can you can land up in so much trouble and um,

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something that, for instance, in South Africa at the moment,

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the big thing in our public health world is that we getting a HIV prevention injection, that if you HIV negative,

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you can take it once every six months and you won't get you highly unlikely to contract HIV.

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But it gets confused so very often with a vaccine, for instance, and having to explain that to to an audience.

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But an example is that we have a very credible scientist.

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And I did a story about this, um, medication that you can use.

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It's caught in a cup of beer. And she wanted to use that analogy, and she said, it's like a chemical condom.

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It's like a chemical condom that you take and you won't get HIV.

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And I got contacted by, you know, donors who sponsor it and, um, very upset saying,

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you can't say it's a chemical condom because, um, really, it's like a lung thing.

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Medication. You can't really compare it to a condom.

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And to me, that explanation made it so easy to understand.

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And. Yet there were so many people who were unhappy about it, and I want that you did.

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Um, Debbie, you mentioned that you used that analogy and, you know, it became so complex when you used it.

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What are your experience about that further?

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I think it's really hard because when you do science communication, there's always someone who's unhappy in general.

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Like, I remember making a joke, um, when I was doing, like, a festival talk and I was saying about cruise ships,

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I don't know if some of you remember during the Covid pandemic,

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the Diamond Princess cruise ship where a lot of people were infected on it and it spread around,

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and I use it as a case study of how difficult it was to manage,

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because they didn't want to take everybody off the ship because then you could spread it further.

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But then if you keep everyone on the ship or you imprisoning people. And so they were in this terrible conundrum.

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And I just made a joke that, you know,

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cruise ships are terrible for like public health or public health perspective because so many things spread on them.

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So like, don't go on cruises.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Um, but I think you get ready. Someone will be, um, unhappy with what you say.

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And so I guess my take is like, I kind of always think of, like, the dinner table conversation.

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And I'm curious me if this is similar. Kind of.

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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,

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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.

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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?

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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?

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And that's the approach I do with simplicity. And you do I think to me accuracy is important.

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So it's that you have to be simplistic but accurate, but you do lose complexity in that and the nuances and all that.

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So coming back to like the piece today I've done on tobacco,

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I couldn't go into the history of tobacco control and the different interventions and the evidence base for ease and,

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you know, illicit tobacco and what happens when you ban stuff in the underground.

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I just had to do a piece that someone asked me, what is this legislation about?

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What does it do? And what do you think I would say about?

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And that's how I tried to write it. So in my head I work it out and then I just write it.

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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,

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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.

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A lot of the smokers are like really happy that legislation is being brought in because,

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you know, they do feel that tobacco companies have kind of gotten away with quite, quite a lot.

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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

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public health professor so people can kind of you got to keep the lightness to it,

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I guess. And yeah, I guess the challenge I face and I wanted to ask your opinion was around misinformation.

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That, like I don't have a good answer for it.

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Like, what do we do now with the internet and everything else going on and social media?

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How do you tackle this in a sense of what are you trying to teach your science communicators about what they should be doing?

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I think the challenge is that with social media.

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Misinformation spreads faster than the accurate information because it's generally more appealing.

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It's emotional. It's there are there are things that drive it.

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And. If I think back, say, during our HIV denialism period in South Africa,

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if someone was going to respond to an HIV story with the right information that you did,

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they're going to have to either cite on radio or they were going to have to publish an update and mention your article.

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It took time to respond, but today you can respond immediately if you, uh, a person was spreading misinformation.

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So when we talk about tackling it, the one thing is that we should not stay away from social media.

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I think we should.

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I believe we should use exactly the same channels that people who spread misinformation use to spread that information to tackle it and,

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and, and have the right information. Of course, you're not going to respond.

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The golden rule is then respond to the people directly. It never ends in anything constructively.

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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,

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ironically, the information that, um, anti-vaxxers, for instance, spread excuse as to when to do stories about certain things.

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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.

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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.

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We would use that as a cue to start doing. Stories about why humans can't just use animal medicine.

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Um, or, you know, what's the difference between a viral disease and a parasitic disease?

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Or if they are lots of tweets all of a sudden about same heart related side effects of, uh, Covid vaccine?

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We would start doing stories about what's the difference between a rare side effect and a common side effect.

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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.

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But what I find very hard, what I find much harder to address than outright misinformation,

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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,

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or I find it hard to address, say, academic polarisations, for instance,

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during Covid in my country, and I'm sure and in many other countries,

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there were a lot of really big fights between scientists as to should we have lockdowns or shouldn't be,

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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?

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And the story was around, we could get AstraZeneca much faster,

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but we had a variant in the country that AstraZeneca didn't seem to work for at the time.

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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.

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But what it resulted in was, if you get then say, for instance, of radio or television stations to amplify those messages,

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they don't necessarily know about the politics between academics.

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They basically take the person on air who is the most available, who is the most willing to come on.

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And, you know, it's the difference between who's willing to come on a ten at night and who and not.

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And in that way, I sometimes felt that a lot of misinformation was actually spread by scientists themselves, because we're the scientists.

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Sometimes that will take a health economist to tell you how a vaccine works or, you know, a doctor and especially healthy.

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That is not necessarily a person who can speak about vaccines.

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And that's I find almost that competition for attention during a pandemic I found almost harder to address than the direct misinformation.

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That's just really wrong. How did you experience that?

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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,

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someone who shouldn't be speaking about a certain thing, and there they are, because they available and that on set they phone.

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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.

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So when I give an example in Britain was around masks. Right.

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I think there's a really valid public debate over when do you implement mandatory masks and where and in which age groups.

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And that's a very nuanced discussion, because in general, people don't like wearing masks.

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And also in children, you know, they could be considered a more, you know, heavy intervention than an adult's.

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Right. What you instead got, instead of a kind of a nuanced public debate, was do masks work?

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So I found this really bizarre because I would be sitting on panels and people would be like, do masks work?

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And I'm like, of course they work. We use them in surgical settings.

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We use them in, you know,

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infectious disease control for a long time is do you really want to be sticking these on every single member of the population?

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Because they have to we're putting them on kids in nurseries or making them in shops or transport or just in hospitals.

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And so I think what kind of got me was sometimes like the question being asked was not the right one,

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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.

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And I feel like, no, you should be saying I don't like masks.

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And therefore I think it's a disproportionate intervention compared to the risk of Covid similar with lockdowns.

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You know, the number of lockdowns don't work. I'm like, how can a lockdown not work?

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You basically take people, you imprison them in their home and they can't see anybody's.

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You reduce their number of social contacts. Is it a proportional thing to do is a completely different question, right.

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Because it has harms as has been discussed.

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So that's a discussion over do the harms of a lockdown are they outweighed by the benefits of reducing social contact.

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Instead they were like oh, lockdowns don't work. And I'm like how can it not work?

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That's just a silly debate to be having. You get dragged into these and you see people on TV having them.

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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,

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someone would be on and they'd be saying something and you'd be like, why are they talking about that?

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That makes no sense.

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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.

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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.

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Um, and this relates generally, I'd say, to public health, not even tied to anything related to the pandemic.

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Which is the algorithms prefer content.

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That is outrageous. That is what sells.

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That is what gets clicks and others. And that's the financial model, because what gets clicked on gets more views, gets advertising revenue.

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And therefore. So for example, all you got to do is take a podcast, take diary of a CEO.

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Some of you might have listen to this at the start.

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The podcast was actually quite reasonable and had guests on who had kind of really interesting balanced views.

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But if you look at the evolution of the podcast, they started taking on more and more radical views and views.

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I would consider sometimes not factually accurate.

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But those views, those guests and those podcasts sometimes got the most clicks and the most traffic.

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And a podcast model is advertisers are paying for that podcast.

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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.

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And often what is the most attention is saying something outrageous.

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And it is really difficult as an academic, because if you look at the most successful, take a book on Covid,

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the most successful book on Covid in terms of sales is the one by RFK Jr,

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which is like basically the Covid conspiracy, Fauci and everything else, right?

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There's not a lot of, I would say, facts in it. Right.

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It's a tirade about like how it's manmade. Fauci's implicated and so on and why vaccines don't work.

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In terms of book sales? Hands down.

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I mean, it's sold. There were so many other Covid books that came out.

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Um, I wrote one. Plenty of people wrote one, which is kind of different academic takes on it, journalistic takes.

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It didn't generate the same kind of interest as that did, to the point that I almost was like, you know,

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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.

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And that probably would have had the most sales, because that's would have generated outrage.

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So I really struggle with this because I know that now, you know, recommendation me is that,

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you know, we should go on to social media, we should go on to these platforms.

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And but I'm kind of a bit like if we go on to the platforms and we play by their game,

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which is the algorithms and trying to generate interest, it kind of goes against what I think is kind of.

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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?

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Will a public health academic sitting in Oxford or sitting in London look at my work and say, that's accurate.

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She's she she she deserves her professor title because what she's saying is actually accurate to the evidence.

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And I think unfortunately, it's a very slippery slope when you start going into the world of likes, followers, attention, popularity,

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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.

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Then you're popular and then you have a base.

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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.

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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.

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The academic was putting up YouTube videos, 50 views, 100 views.

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Kept trying to get attention like I could see him posting. And I was thinking, it's not getting the traction.

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And then he comes out and he he starts taking like what I would say contrarian positions.

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Vaccines don't work.

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More people have died by vaccines and saved by vaccines, which again, I don't have any evidence base you can say about vaccinations.

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I think you can acknowledge their side effects. There's vaccine related injuries. Do we have to vaccinate as much as we vaccinate?

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Those are all appropriate debates. Do vaccines have they killed more people than health?

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I think is not really a fair. His videos now millions of years.

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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,

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right, you post something and you're looking how many people have watched, maybe you're not.

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I mean, how many people have liked it or how many people have engaged with it.

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It becomes the incentive structure gets skewed for science communication.

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So that'd be like my only word of warning about about that, um,

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having having seen these platforms and how they work and how various academics have tried to engage with them.

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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.

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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?

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You no longer just write the story on a website. You also do an Instagram reel, that sort of thing.

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If you look at it and you look at research as to where do people get the information from?

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And let's look at the news, information, data. And let's assume like science communication is part of that.

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Then the fastest growing channels on my side of the world in in my country, South Africa, news channels, how people access news.

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The fastest growing channels um, channel is TikTok in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria.

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And do then say that you're not going to use TikTok.

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Um, you know, because they are a different set of rules, which is true.

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If you put something out in a news stream, it goes through certain controls, you know,

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through a news editor, through a subeditor before it's published, and social media, the rules are gone.

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You can put out whatever you want, and your reach depends on these algorithms, but also the number of followers that you have.

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So you can make the most insane comments that you want.

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If you've got a million followers, you can reach more people than you, than the person who has the right information.

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Like you and I could be in an equally compelling form.

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They're not going to reach as many people as you. That's a very complex thing.

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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?

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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,

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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.

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Um, are people going to start to criticise your peers and that sort of thing?

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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.

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And look, in five years from now, it might not be Tik-Tok, it might be some new platform that's emerged.

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The other challenge about it is it's so time consuming.

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You can't possibly, as an academic who's doing research, go and compile these reels all the time.

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And we do it at my organisation, because you do have to adjust to, you know, how the media works.

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But we a small organisation and I can tell you if you want to put out a good Instagram reel for news,

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it takes you three four hours to to to produce it because you can't just talk.

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You need pictures over it, that sort of thing.

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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,

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which is only health research stories and policy stories,

330
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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.

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Amplification of stories matter. I guess that's what I want to say.

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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.

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You need to try and get your story amplified as much as you can.

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And that Tik-Tok fast is grabbing news source there.

335
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The study that was done, the age ranges were between 15 and 35.

336
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It wasn't 15 and 16. You know the kind of person who takes it up with Instagram Reels, for instance.

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It's becoming older.

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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,

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you know, from social media, I, I very rarely directly go to a website or YouTube.

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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.

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But increasingly, if you, for instance, look at, say, television stations, they're starting to get their reporters to do to do Instagram,

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not like a repetition of what was on air, but to do a different version, because that is how people consume information now.

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So no clear answer. But I do think it would it would be dangerous to say that we'll never do that.

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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.

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But. I do think we need to.

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If we want the right information to reach people, we do need to use the platforms that they use to get that information.

347
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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.

348
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So I had a student come see me recently who said she's undergraduate medical student and said, I want to do science communication.

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What's your advice? And I said, well, either you can like, you know, do your masters, do your PhD,

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establish an academic career, and then from that branch out into being asked this,

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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.

352
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And guess what? You're a science communicator. And she looked at me and I said, yeah, I'm not on ice, Samia.

353
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Honestly, I'm not on TikTok.

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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,

355
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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.

356
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I mean, I was a student at Oxford, you know, and I went through a very academic path of like learning the jargon.

357
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I remember being in Oxford for the first few months. I just come off, you know, from from Miami,

358
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Oxford dad difference Miami's you can get and people were having conversations

359
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and I doing seminars and I had like no idea what people are talking about.

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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.

361
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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.

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It's a different language. So every time they take a sentence like, translate it to like what you think it means.

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So I started almost like a different language, starting to translate.

364
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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.

365
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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,

366
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because I went into it like becoming an academic, doing my grants,

367
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getting my academic credibility, and then branching out into science communication on the side.

368
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And I guess it comes me to that, what I want to speak about, which is some of the risks of doing it.

369
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Because when you do go on these platforms, you can get a lot of comments.

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And it's one thing to get comments on my Guardian piece, which is like,

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you're anti-foreign or why should we ban tobacco or whatever, which don't hit that hard in some ways, right?

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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,

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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.

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If you've built a scientific career based on your brain and based on your knowledge and based on your competence.

375
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So all of a sudden, be someone like, you know, and excuse my language, like, I don't like this dumb [INAUDIBLE], right?

376
00:35:52,310 --> 00:35:55,400
Like that's the kind of stuff you get on Instagram. Sorry for on break.

377
00:35:55,400 --> 00:35:59,000
It breached Oxford language things that I was doing it in quotations.

378
00:35:59,000 --> 00:36:03,200
So it's not me saying it's a, it's a quote. Um, and there's a lot of that.

379
00:36:03,200 --> 00:36:06,529
There's a lot of that of like you're put yourself out.

380
00:36:06,530 --> 00:36:12,349
I remember I did, you know a good Morning Britain over about Covid and someone like a really big

381
00:36:12,350 --> 00:36:16,820
account with like millions of followers take a picture of me and was like,

382
00:36:17,120 --> 00:36:20,269
who's this? Who's this bird waffling on all the time?

383
00:36:20,270 --> 00:36:24,329
Which again, if you don't know, like bird is quite a demeaning word for like a women.

384
00:36:24,330 --> 00:36:30,080
And when you're up there speaking about like an expert topic. So I was like, why am I doing this?

385
00:36:30,410 --> 00:36:34,970
Like, well, why? Because in academia, I mean, I guess this is a challenge for you.

386
00:36:35,510 --> 00:36:40,159
There is not much appreciation for public engagement. You'll probably have failed this in Oxford, right?

387
00:36:40,160 --> 00:36:45,290
You need to do really well at your exams. You need to get your grants and you need to get your publications.

388
00:36:45,290 --> 00:36:49,310
You need to have peer review of your work. Right. You need to establish credibility.

389
00:36:49,850 --> 00:36:52,129
And where does science communication fit in there.

390
00:36:52,130 --> 00:36:56,959
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.

391
00:36:56,960 --> 00:37:01,640
But also how do you engage academics? You feel like that's not my core work.

392
00:37:01,940 --> 00:37:09,140
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.

393
00:37:11,160 --> 00:37:15,610
I guess, you know, when we have scientists that we often do media training with,

394
00:37:15,960 --> 00:37:23,640
the argument I often try to use is if you want your science to go some way to be used in politics,

395
00:37:23,640 --> 00:37:27,730
people need to know about it because science is pretty useless, right?

396
00:37:27,830 --> 00:37:31,140
If it if it's not translated into policies, how would it then?

397
00:37:31,350 --> 00:37:32,549
Not useless, but, you know,

398
00:37:32,550 --> 00:37:39,750
meaningless in terms of how it would change our daily lives if it can be used by people that the findings that people have.

399
00:37:40,590 --> 00:37:51,749
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,

400
00:37:51,750 --> 00:37:58,050
but in the way that they would communicate, say, in a meeting with government officials or other key players,

401
00:37:58,830 --> 00:38:01,830
then the light seems to go on for them a little bit.

402
00:38:01,830 --> 00:38:08,310
But I agree with you that scientists, the time consuming nature of.

403
00:38:09,400 --> 00:38:15,940
Engaging with the public is a big barrier for for academics because their real job is something else.

404
00:38:16,540 --> 00:38:21,589
However. I have seen quite a few signs, increasingly.

405
00:38:21,590 --> 00:38:28,879
Signs. Organisations raising funds to appoint journalists with science communicator right there at the organisation.

406
00:38:28,880 --> 00:38:33,680
That that definitely helps. Well having their own communications department almost.

407
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:41,720
And not just people who issue press releases, but to actually do stories about their own work that they put on their website.

408
00:38:42,080 --> 00:38:45,500
And that is then often consumed by the media.

409
00:38:45,890 --> 00:38:50,660
The thing about the media is we've lost, uh, economic model with online.

410
00:38:50,690 --> 00:38:54,230
We no longer get the advertising that we need to survive.

411
00:38:54,650 --> 00:38:57,770
So increasingly you have newsrooms that are really,

412
00:38:57,770 --> 00:39:04,069
really under resourced and now increasingly open to using stories like that in

413
00:39:04,070 --> 00:39:08,240
their own publications where they would never have considered doing that ten,

414
00:39:08,240 --> 00:39:13,430
15 years ago. So I do think that starting to invest in, uh.

415
00:39:14,550 --> 00:39:23,640
Storytelling or communications department at my academic institution or a NGO.

416
00:39:23,880 --> 00:39:27,600
Really does pay off because that helps with.

417
00:39:28,940 --> 00:39:33,590
Like making the burden lighter on academics themselves to do these things.

418
00:39:34,190 --> 00:39:38,240
Um. I do think that, you know, we.

419
00:39:39,200 --> 00:39:47,470
When science and policy comes together and when communication helps with that, there is if you can see the impact of that it.

420
00:39:48,490 --> 00:39:52,580
Does help to make a bigger investment in science communication.

421
00:39:52,600 --> 00:40:00,110
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.

422
00:40:00,130 --> 00:40:10,870
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.

423
00:40:11,170 --> 00:40:13,090
And then all of a sudden a week later,

424
00:40:13,090 --> 00:40:19,690
they would travel bans against us completely based on no science saying if that variant is, yeah, we can't travel anywhere.

425
00:40:20,110 --> 00:40:27,830
And the worst thing was. They told South Africans they required PCR tests to be tested for Covid.

426
00:40:27,860 --> 00:40:37,840
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,

427
00:40:37,850 --> 00:40:43,990
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,

428
00:40:44,000 --> 00:40:47,600
it had to be sent away to a third country. And.

429
00:40:49,480 --> 00:40:55,510
All scientists really rallied and the media rallied and really communicated.

430
00:40:56,110 --> 00:41:00,610
How unscientific this was, but how the virus was basically being racialized.

431
00:41:00,610 --> 00:41:07,360
If you come from Africa, your. John infection needed different rules from someone who was elsewhere,

432
00:41:07,720 --> 00:41:13,330
and we saw policies change because of that rallying and because of that communication.

433
00:41:13,780 --> 00:41:17,829
I remember advocacy, so that was by no one, no means just us.

434
00:41:17,830 --> 00:41:22,630
We changed this. It was of scientists, everyone together. But we wrote an op ed about it.

435
00:41:22,750 --> 00:41:25,840
And it was it travelled fast.

436
00:41:25,840 --> 00:41:33,460
It travelled right up to the World Health Organisation and the meeting that we had, they had the Civil Society Forum co-edited,

437
00:41:33,850 --> 00:41:41,240
and this Canadian Health Commission in South Africa took it up, had a meeting with a um in country.

438
00:41:41,980 --> 00:41:45,160
Well, they team in Canada and quoted from the op ed.

439
00:41:45,430 --> 00:41:47,260
So I do think that.

440
00:41:49,220 --> 00:41:57,980
We shouldn't underestimate what quick action, what lots of resources putting into a certain issue can do to really change policy as well.

441
00:41:57,980 --> 00:42:03,290
And I think when that happens, we start to allocate a little bit more resources to it.

442
00:42:03,800 --> 00:42:07,340
Um, but it's uh. It's a complex thing.

443
00:42:07,360 --> 00:42:11,430
I know academics, if I'm an academic, I would want to get my research published right.

444
00:42:11,440 --> 00:42:17,560
But if it gets published and no one knows about it and policymakers don't know about it, then.

445
00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:23,600
Then it doesn't do what it essentially could ultimately do.

446
00:42:24,410 --> 00:42:28,460
How do you how do you find that? How do you balance your time when it comes to.

447
00:42:29,870 --> 00:42:34,700
How many TV interviews are you going to do compared to how many research articles that you going to get published?

448
00:42:36,020 --> 00:42:37,970
It's very tricky, I think.

449
00:42:38,150 --> 00:42:45,520
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.

450
00:42:45,530 --> 00:42:48,780
I lead a master's in public health. I have to teach and supervise students.

451
00:42:48,800 --> 00:42:51,470
I've got to get my research done. I'm working on a grant application.

452
00:42:51,740 --> 00:42:56,140
And so I will pick up interview or radio or things if I feel like it's important.

453
00:42:56,150 --> 00:43:01,220
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.

454
00:43:01,670 --> 00:43:05,239
Um, but I would say probably right now through the university press office,

455
00:43:05,240 --> 00:43:12,559
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.

456
00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:15,920
There was an exception made during Covid because it was a life threatening emergency.

457
00:43:15,920 --> 00:43:19,760
It wasn't a situation where I felt like we needed to get information out.

458
00:43:19,760 --> 00:43:21,590
Surprisingly, that time balance changed.

459
00:43:22,040 --> 00:43:31,009
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.

460
00:43:31,010 --> 00:43:34,520
So, um, should I stop there and then we open it up to the class?

461
00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:41,790
Yeah, I think thanks. Um, Fabian, thank you for sharing your insight that it was a fascinating conversation for us to to to hear.