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Well, all right, well, thank you, Crystal, for the introduction.

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I'm just going to tell you a bit about what it is, who we are and what we do, and a lot of what I talk about will be COVID 19.

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And then if I have time at the end, I'll go through in brief what we do in peacetime in case that's of interest as well.

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So the Science Media Centre is an independent press office. We were set up in 2002.

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That was after there'd been several kind of high profile front page stories that went a bit wrong.

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So things like the MMR and autism health scare GM crops Franken foods when they were first being discussed and in CJD.

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So these were the kinds of headlines that we had at the time scary, scary stuff about the harms of vaccines.

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Around that time, there was a House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee hearing on science in society.

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Several people who gave evidence not hearing mentioned these fake stories and said that

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one of the common factors was that we didn't hear enough from scientists and experts.

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We knew what the evidence was, so we heard plenty from campaigners and politicians and people with an agenda.

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We didn't hear enough from people who actually knew. Is this something we should be worried about or not?

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So what was proposed was an independent organisation that would work with the scientific

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community and the mass media to put these two groups of people in touch with each other,

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more often more efficiently within the timescales that are useful to journalists to try and avoid any unwarranted health scares,

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to try and make sure that media coverage is as accurate and responsible as possible.

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And why do we still care about the media in these days of social media and online stuff?

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Well, the latest evidence still suggests that most people still get their information from what you would call traditional news sources.

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So newspapers, of course, that might not be the the Mail Online or the BBC, online TV and radio.

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So yes, blogs are great and things like social media are important.

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But we say ignore the mass media at your peril because that is still where most people get their information from,

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particularly people who aren't seeking out science. So the ordinary members of the public who will in a way hear about science by

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accident because they're listening to the news or they're reading the newspaper.

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And we often say to scientists, if you don't speak to the media, then someone else will.

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We all know at the moment there's there's 24-7 news coverage,

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and journalists don't wait to hear from the world's number one top expert in a thing before they will cover a story.

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They have to cover it, then that's the way breaking news in particular works, so they will cover it with or without you.

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So if you are an expert in this area, better that they hear from you. But the piece, the piece of news,

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and therefore everyone who reads that or hears it will benefit from your expertise as well as Crystal mentioned at the beginning,

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we always say that we'll help the media to do science better. When scientists do the media better, it's very much a two way thing.

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Journalists aren't scientists. They can't be expected to get everything right without the help of experts, and the CMC is particularly concerned,

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in fact solely concerned with the accuracy and quality of media reporting.

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So unlike other press offices, we don't have in-house experts, we don't have our own scientists, we don't publish science.

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So we're not doing PR for a certain thing. We're not trying to get coverage for a certain thing.

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We're just concerned with when the media are reporting about science that they do it in as accurate and as responsible a way possible.

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Not expecting you to read this. This is just to remind me to tell you how we are funded.

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So I said we're an independent organisation and we are we are funded loosely by the scientific community.

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So lots of universities, some industry, some government departments and learnt societies, the fund, the big science funders.

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We've also got a couple of media funders in there. So the Daily Mail and the Times, now both funders as well.

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We cap donations at five percent of our annual income. So we maintain independence from all these places and nobody can tell us to do something.

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Ask us not to do something, check to us if we if we do something, we make all the editorial decisions ourselves about what stories we work on.

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So these are the three groups of people we work with. We've got about three thousand scientists from across the UK.

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Mostly, they are university academics, also a few industry scientists.

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Research charity director of research sometimes thinks about twelve hundred press officers from

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all the institutes that we work with and then a bunch of journalists who are on our press lists.

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The journals that we work with are the science, health and environment specialist correspondents at all the UK nationals.

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So in the UK, we've got obviously the broadsheets, the tabloids, broadcast channels,

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notebooks and news wires like PR Reuters, who feeds their Typekit into all the other outlets.

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And we're lucky in the UK that all of these places still has a science correspondent and health.

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First of all, an environment correspondent, that's not the case in other countries, so we're really lucky to have those here.

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And we're often saying to scientists if any journalist is going to do a decent job of your research, especially the science correspondents.

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So just to go through the main things that we do at the on a day to day basis to try

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and achieve our aims of increasing the accuracy of evidence based media reporting.

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So those three things are rapid reactions, round ups and press briefings.

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So first, a rapid reaction is what we do when there's a big breaking story.

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It won't surprise you that the one I'm going to talk to you about is this COVID 19.

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So we started working on this in mid-January when we were seeing headlines like these,

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which now seem slightly surreal, talking about a mystery illness in a few people in China.

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And we're very media led at the assembly. So when this became a headline for media, that was when we started to work on this.

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And what we do is when there is a breaking story that journalists are covering or that they are interested in and they get in touch

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with us and ask us to help with is we go to our database of experts and find those with the relevant expertise and ask them to help.

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So usually that is to give us a written comment that we can send out by email to the journalists on our press.

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So these are quotes they don't have to be short sound bite sentences.

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They can be quite sciencey paragraphs. We make no apology for the fact that we are here for the scientific community,

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and scientists are welcome to talk about science and evidence, and that's what we want them to do.

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So we ask them to give us written quotes and then we sort of pump these out by email to journalists from all across the media.

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Journalists are welcome to use those as they wish so they can cut and paste them into their articles, which they often do.

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They can use them to to help inform their patients to help their understanding.

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And then they can get back to us and say, I've seen the comment from Professor Smith.

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Can you put me in touch with her and I can ask some more questions about it? So that's what we did.

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The first day we worked on this was a Saturday in mid-January.

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This was when it was called. We had coronavirus, and so we went to our experts in the database and asked journalists, don't ask about this.

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Tell us about it. How concerned should we be? How worrying, high worrying is the situation?

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By the way, I'm not expecting you to read any of what I'm showing you.

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These are just kind of I'm just sort of showing you pictures to show you snapshots of the kind of thing that we did.

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So these are the kinds of people that we send out comments from so far from the Wellcome Trust.

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Ashley McDermott, who is a scientist and clinician based at King's College London.

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Other experts in zoonotic diseases from from her bright people who are experts in

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global health and experts and immunology modelling experts like Michael Hasse,

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Edinburgh. Virologists, people at my. So these people, all centres and more all centres comments on that Saturday about what we knew,

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what we didn't know, which was a lot, and we sent those out by email to journalists.

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And this is the kind of thing that we see later that day or the next day. So media articles using the quotes that we send out.

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So this is just an example of one in the mirror, and you can see where the quotes were used.

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So quite quickly we realised this is this is a big story. We were getting dozens of calls every day.

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So within a couple of days of starting to work on this, we arranged our first press briefings,

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so physical press conference that we have in our normally in our offices in London.

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So this is just what the invitation looks like, that we send that to journalists.

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So we gathered a panel of four leading experts who could cover different topics.

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So we had a model where we had an infectious disease expert, we had a global disease expert.

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We had someone can Wellcome. And the idea is that journalists are ringing us asking the same questions.

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Journalists are trying to get in touch with scientists to have their questions answered. Scientists are their phones are ringing off the hook,

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so let's get them all together in one room so that scientists can give their take on the situation.

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Journalists can ask their questions. All the other journalists can benefit from the answers to their peers questions.

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So we had loads of journalists attend from across the kind of media spectrum.

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So broadcast, tabloid broadsheets, etc. This is what they look like.

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So these obviously this was before social distancing was a thing.

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And so the panellists on a chockablock room full of journalists and camera crews who wanted to hear about the science behind this.

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And these are just some examples of where comments that were given in the briefing were used to inform the media articles,

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which which happens after that. So in the Times in the Express, again,

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just showing the across the board journalists who are trying to get this right and were really keen to hear from scientists,

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and then they were all on the news as well. And then within.

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On the days and weeks that followed that briefing, the the comments that were made by the scientists at that briefing continue to inform the article.

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So quite a lot of the Mail Online articles, for example, had a little box or fact box, which they'd drawn up from the briefings.

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So it full of points from the briefing scientists.

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And I think almost all the articles they wrote on on COVID after that have these boxes at the at the end,

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so continue to inform coverage, which is great for us because that's what we want.

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Is these scientists out there in the coverage informing it so that the public hearing from the experts.

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And then these are just a few examples of the early kind of developments which we

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gathered these rapid reaction comments to to send out to journalists by email.

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So this was the first kind of inkling that asymptomatic spread might be a thing.

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So when that happened, we have questions from journalists. So we went back to our experts and said, Can you send us a comment about this?

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So these are the kinds of experts that we that we send out comments from.

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This is just what it looks like when journalists receive our emails and they're free to copy and paste these quotes, which they did.

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So that's just one example in the Mail Online. That's that sort of sandbox thing I was mentioning.

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So that Blue Box at the end appeared in in scores of articles chock a block full of good scientists talking about evidence.

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So that's great. Then we had the first case, I think of onward transmission in a country outside of China.

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Again, we go back to the experts and say, Give us a comment on this. Everyone's asking about it.

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Let's get some reliable information out there. And again, this gets used in the media.

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And then, of course, when we had our first two detected cases in England,

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that was that was a big one, and journalists were really keen to get expert comments.

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So again, we send we send out expert comments and they can use them as they wish and they get used in the media articles like this.

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So the idea is that we keep pumping out evidence based quotes from good experts to so as to not to leave a void in the media.

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So some journalists are left without any experts that can help them so that the public can hear from good experts.

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Because this is such a big story, we kept doing briefings.

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We kept running these these press briefings with a sort of panel of experts who could answer all the questions that journalists might have.

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So this one we ran a couple of weeks after the first one again,

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a really big turnout from across different types of media outlets, lots of camera crews again and then and then again.

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Another couple of weeks later, we ran a similar one. Crystal was on the panel for this one, and she was great, of course.

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So and again, we wanted to have someone who could address modelling and stops someone who could talk about clinical science,

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someone who's could talk about virology, somebody to talk about global health, etc. And that was another busy one.

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And there you can see a crystal front and centre on the panel there.

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And these are just some of the examples of articles that came out of that

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briefing or that were informed from information that was given at that briefing.

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So that is what a rapid reaction is.

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So it's written quotes that we send out from scientists to journalists, and they can use them, and it can be these sort of emergency press briefings.

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And these are just some examples of the other kinds of developments that we

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have said typewritten comments in response to over the last five months or so.

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The kind of stats that come out daily from D.H or weekly from the Beyonce or the NHS Test and

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Trace programme when the government announced something big or bring in policy like lockdown,

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et cetera, stuff about face coverings two metres.

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Anything that's controversial and that there's a kind of either a perceived rather by or that there's confusion about schools.

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Should they close, should they open some of the treatments that are coming through now, including the finally,

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thankfully some good news with dexamethasone the other day, something like vaccines when sage kind of dump the the evidence online,

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we get comments in response to that and also new new journal papers in preprints, which which of which there have been hundreds,

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of course, because of all the new science, which is which is being done on this and this.

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I just thought I'd go through to illustrate one slightly unusual thing which we have now been doing for the last, I think, nine weeks.

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This was in the early days when the US first started publishing on Tuesdays their weekly their weekly stance on COVID 19 deaths in all settings.

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And so there'd been a couple of weeks of this, and each week we had gathered these written comments that we sent out.

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And then Carl Hennigan from Oxford said, Should we do something on this because you're getting lots called,

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let's suppose we're all trying to control the journalists questions. Should we do a sort of online briefing?

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So we said, of course, that's a great idea. Let's let's do it. So every Tuesday, since since mid-April,

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we have got this excellent group of experts the David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge and Carl Henning, an adjacent bloke from Oxford.

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And this is a sort of lunchtime briefing. So in the morning, when the stats come out, these scientists spend the morning analysing the stats,

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putting together their own graphs, working out what they think the stats show.

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And then 1:30 or 1:15, we do an online briefing via Zoom,

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and these experts present their view of what the owner's data is showing and journalists get to ask their questions there.

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They've been well attended, and this is just one example. So this was the.

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One loads of coverage, of course, was happening anyway, because the onus had released the stats,

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but these were the kinds of headlines that were informed by what the scientist said in the briefing, including that they were talking about.

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It looks like the peak in hospitals. At least five deaths had happened in early April.

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And that's just to show where some of the comments from the briefing were used.

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And then the second week that we did this again, lots of journalists came along.

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Lots of articles informed by the comments they made in the briefing, including the sort of worry about deaths in care homes.

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So that's just one example of the briefings that we've done, I think we've done over 40 briefings since January on this.

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Obviously since lockdown, we've been doing them remotely on Zoom, which we're very sceptical about at first.

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We like having press briefings in person, whereas scientists and journalists, you know, meet each other and see the lines of each other's eyes.

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And great things happen when when that happens, but reluctantly have to admit that the Zoom briefings have worked well and have been popular.

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And we're really grateful that we're able to do them because we wouldn't have been able to do anything from the total without them.

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These are just some of the other examples of stories that we've done briefings on on COVID.

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So stuff about are are we going to have a second wave? How does testing work?

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What's the virus test? What's the antibody test? What about the app and contact tracing?

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What about children's susceptibility and transmission and disease severity?

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And should schools be open? We've run a couple actually with Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance as well when they can explain to the

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science journalists rather than the political hacks who get who tend to attend the Downing Street briefings.

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What is SAGE? How does it work? How does evidence based policy work?

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How does scientific evidence to government work? So those are just some of the examples.

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So that is that's covert.

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That is what we've been doing almost exclusively for the last five months that we have done similar things on other big stories,

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including swine flu and Ebola and Zika. Years ago, Novichok a couple of years ago now cases like Charlie Garden, Alfie Evans,

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when they were big in the news at Fukushima, as Crystal mentioned at the beginning, but none has been as big as it has been.

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So I'll just spend a couple of minutes before we sort through questions

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describing what we also do in kind of peacetime when we're not in the situation.

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So our main bread and butter really is what we call the roundup.

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And that's what we do when there's a new piece of science that's coming out again in normal times.

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This happens through peer reviewed journal publication, of course.

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So normally we thought there's an embargo period, which means the journal or a university will send out a press release to journalists.

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And then there and then that information is under embargo for 24 hours.

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For example, that embargo period gives the journalists time to do whatever research they need to do.

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Speak to some other experts. Put their act together before everyone publishes it at the same time.

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And actually, most stories that you read in the news in normal times come come from this.

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So they will come from the press release, from a journal or from a university or a research college or something like that.

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And the science and health journals will usually write five to 10 stories today, even even when it's not COVID times.

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So we get the press releases from these journals.

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We try and identify stories that are remnants of the kind of controversial topics I was talking about earlier,

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or if we see a story that we think that's going to get media coverage and it might be misinterpreted or that could be scary,

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we should find out from scientists if if it's warranted, that it's scary or if they can help put it into context.

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So I've just picked a random one from a few years ago. This was a paper in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine about e-cigarettes and smoking cessation.

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E-cigs obviously have been hugely controversial, so that takes the box of an assembly topic.

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This press release was saying e-cigarettes aren't helping smokers quit.

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We knew that was controversial. We knew from chats with scientists that that perhaps wasn't what all the evidence was showing.

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So we got in touch with experts and said, Please,

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can you read this paper and send us a written comment that we can send out to journalists to help them with their reporting?

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So these are the kinds of things that we send out to read is just my highlighting to pick out some studies to mention to you.

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So here's an expert saying I think it's a failure of the peer review system that this has been published at all.

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You know someone else saying that the conclusions are at best tentative and at worst incorrect,

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and that it was a some sort of systematic review and that the observational studies

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that were looked up in this review were not very good themselves and other

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people saying that this is really misleading and not not the conclusions weren't

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backed up by the evidence and the science is there on McNeil at the bottom,

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who she'd actually authored some of the studies that this review looks at and just pointing out they haven't,

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they haven't interpreted our results correctly. So very strong quotes.

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That's absolutely fine with us. We want scientists to be honest and frank.

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We send these to journalists and this has been widely press release and there was only three articles in the U.K. media and in this guardian one,

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the word contested is in the headline, and that's from the comments that we sent out.

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Also in the mail, they covered it, but again, they use the quotes that we send.

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So adding that context and as did the Sun.

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So if you read any of these pieces to the bottom, you would know that U.K. scientists didn't agree with this and they thought it wasn't accurate.

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And this was a nice comment that we had from one of the journalists on our list who said, thanks to the scientists who commented on this,

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I'm not going to cover it or I'm not going to cover it as prominently as I was going

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to because I realised that the scientific community doesn't think that it stacks up.

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So that's good for us. That's we for us because we care about accurate coverage.

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If it would be misleading for something to get lots of coverage, then no coverage is obviously.

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Is this just a quick word? Another thing which is called before the headlines,

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this was this is something that we decided to do on some of the more stats heavy papers that we're getting round of quotes on,

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which is when we ask a bank and volunteer statisticians to give a quick, a quick,

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quick and dirty stats analysis of the paper and whether it stacks up again.

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I'm not expecting to read this. This is just to show you what it looks like,

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so it's kind of a format they have to answer specific questions like are the claims supported by the data?

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Do the stocks, the stats stack up? What are the strengths and limitations?

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So for example, whoever put this one together says strength,

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it was large limitation that no correction was made for carrying out three different significance tests.

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So these aren't really designed to be quoted by journalists. But.

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Hopefully, a helpful quick digest of whether the study has been done well and whether its stats are kind of methodologically sound.

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I would think for time. So very quickly, I'll just show a couple of non-COVID briefings just to illustrate what we do normally.

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So two main types of briefings a news briefing when scientists are publishing data,

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a new general paper or a background briefing, which is the sort of evidence check on a hot topic.

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The reasons for doing these is that scientists get to talk on their own terms, present their work to journalists in their own words.

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And journalists get to come and get a story and ask questions of scientists.

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We do these again, particularly on the kind of controversial topics when briefings can be really good at kind of nipping in the bud,

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any misconceptions and heading off at the pass, any kind of misinterpretations or inaccuracies that might otherwise be in the media articles.

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So this was a paper in nature with data from Kathy Neo-Con Crick,

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who had done the first experiments using genome editing in human embryos, so she was presenting her sheet.

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You have this paper coming out and of course, with with genome editing, we've heard about the slippery slope to designer babies,

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and she was concerned that people would get the wrong idea about what she was actually doing and why she why she wanted to do it.

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So we said we'll come and speak to journalists and tell them, tell them what it is that you're doing.

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So we did, and lots of journalists came along and these were the kind of headlines that resulted.

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So gene that could stop IVF from failing is find similarly in the Guardian and the Telegraph master

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gene to create a successful pregnancy discovered in the Mirror as well and the times of the Sun.

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So no sign of designer babies in the headlines and on the articles were full of really science information and really accurate.

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So that just shows again the benefit of scientists proactively engaging with the media to help them report things accurately from the off.

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And then finally, a background briefing is if we see a topic that's kind of covered chronically in the media and we think,

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Oh, I wonder if that's accurate. So we saw lots of articles about the dangers of screen time, particularly for young children.

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So we got in touch with experts and said, Is that right? Is that accurate?

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Are you happy with that? And several of them said, No, it's not that simple.

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Have the evidence, just isn't there.

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And so we again said, Right, come in to see the journals and talk to them about what we what we do and we don't know from the evidence.

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So that's what we did. And these were the kind of headline.

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Again, these briefings aren't designed to generate coverage, but rather to try and inform the journalists.

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So the next time they're probing the topic, they have a kind of better grounding in it.

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But it's all on record. So if they if the briefings do generate coverage, that's fine with us.

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So with that, one of these was some of the headlines we had. So screen time harmed children is unproven.

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WTO gaming disorder is moral panic. Is screen time actually bad for you?

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Probably not. So that's just an example of what we do in peacetime.

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These are just some headlines to remind me to emphasise that we don't just do COVID, although we do at the moment,

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but we do anything that's controversial, messy, politicised, the kind of big science stories of the day.

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So we don't do. We don't tend to work on much good news or kind of things like SpaceX and dinosaurs and that kind of thing.

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Not that they're not interesting, but lots of other organisations work on them.

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So we are here, particularly for the difficult, contested issues to which I think arguably is when we need to hear from scientists the most,

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when the public need to know what the evidence is and isn't. And and we also do do some slightly other things.

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So every once a year,

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we arrange for a statistician to come in and spend a couple of hours with the journalists to try to help them get to grips with the science.

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And we were amazed when we first started doing this about how well-attended they are.

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And I think again, that just goes to show how much the science and health journalists really care about this.

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Really want to understand science and science, really want to report it well.

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So we've got we had David Spiegelhalter the last time we've had Kevin McCormick from the university before.

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And this is just to show us that that's a roomful of journalists giving up two hours of their day not to get a story.

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They're not going to get story about, but to learn about stats and to ask all their questions about stuff.

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So I think that's again, just to champion the the specialist journalists that they do try and report things well.

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And those are just some stats on what we've done on COVID.

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Ignore the June bar that date night, but just to show that our our workload has increased massively.

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That's not because we don't care about our workload, but that's to show that the appetite in the media.

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I don't need to tell you you'll you'll see this on the TV. You know that this is everywhere.

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So normally we do about 300 round up.

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So those are the quotes on new papers a year and about 60 or 70 briefings a year.

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But we can own the journey of it with the help of scientists and.

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Next for us, and that's why we love our database of scientists so much,

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and if any of you are interested in getting involved, then that would be great.

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So please do get in touch with me and we'd be very happy to to to help, to help you speak to journalists as well.