Absolutely agree. I've been saying, since I recognized pieces of the issue in Summer 2020, that we did a poor job of communicating. We might convey data pretty well but if we did it in jargon and without explanation, we were not serving the public.
That is one way of putting it. I'd put it differently.
PH experts during COVID got way out of their lane of expertise. PH experts are supposed to know, be able to develop models, of how diseases spreads and the consequences of the spread. This information conveyed to individuals and policy makers would allow them to design an optimal response to the disease taking into account THEIR valuation of the outcomes in THEIR local conditions, THEIR risk tolerances, and THEIR knowledge of the costs of different ways of responding.
Instead, PH experts recommended what to do. Fore example, PH expertise can in principle tell a school principal how spread will occur among vaccinated/non-vaccinated teachers and students who are or are not tested for infectiousness in a facility that does/does not use determinized types of air filtration/sterilization systems. They cannot make the tradeoff of the value of decreased spread with the costs of the measures to reduce it, including the cost of disruption in learning. CDC's messaging allowed policy makers to claim whatever they did was just following CC guidance, when there should have BEEN o CDC "guidance."
In addition, the way that PH experts talked about vaccines, emphasizing "safety" over effectiveness, probably led to the public being OVERLY concerned about safety and reinforced vaccine hesitancy.
Perhaps these mistakes have been recognized internally, but they have not been acknowledged externally.
I don't think it's necessary an either/or. Those in public health can both work better to communicate ideas within their expertise, as well as being cautious about stepping outside their narrow expertise (alluded to in the 'what context are we missing?' and 'hearing perspectives that might be non-obvious to us' parts above). The distinction between scientific opinions and scientists-with-opinions is a point I made quite often during COVID (e.g. https://x.com/adamjkucharski/status/1358050473098571776?s=20 & https://x.com/adamjkucharski/status/1439160592040964097?s=20) - might elaborate more in a follow up post at some point.
Another way to pu my criticism was that PH officials made recommendations ot what to DO TO THE NEGLET of providing individuals and policy makers with the tools with which to make cost effective decisions, whether that's a problem of "looking down" or not.
Something you might not have appreciated was that, in public health, we were getting information so fast, and so much of it, we integrated the data and reached conclusions that were not wrong, but when we attempted to communicate these, what we often provided was data, and solutions based on our training and historical experience, and often prior planned responses based on modeling and data, but we did not provide Information. We failed to explain where our data and recommended actions originated from. We didn't tell you why our recommendation today was different from yesterday (in my case that well could have been the 20-30 research reports I'd read in that 24 hour period and the 2-3 hours of online chat with clinicians where we discussed what they were seeing in busy ICUs, and how their changes in procedures and treatments were working. That in addition to collecting the day's days, running my models, writing reports for my organization, and also my day job, attempting to summarize what I'd learned.
Another significant failing was that we often wrote and spoke in jargon to a greater or lesser degree, and while our terms were in English, our particular use of them was precise and exact in our little world, but might be interpreted in some other way by someone who read them and didn't possess the secret decoder ring.
Simply, from mid-January 2020 through 2021, I processed a lot of data, answered a lot of questions and wrote a lot of documentation about what we were learning, but honestly, I often did a poor job of communicating. Midway through 2021, the organization I was supporting, a nationwide Not-For-Profit, assigned a public affairs assistant to "translate" what I wrote. That effectively dropped my frequency and productivity because he and I would iterate every report to our leadership, but it did improve the actual communication. And honestly, it was an improvement. I'd known in the early months of the pandemic I was not as clear as I have been known to be when I was communicating one-on-one to a patient or family, but I felt like I had to try to communicate the whole of everything I'd learned. That was a mistake.
A similar phenomenon with Y2K when we were worried that all the computers would shut down because of the millennium....it didn’t happen because everyone put huge efforts into correcting the issue. Then all we heard was not ‘congratulations’ but absolute disbelief that the whole thing had been a scam. I wish we had a similar way to ‘fix COVID-19 but time is telling us this is a ‘horrific virus’!!
> I can understand why a public health researcher might share this message in a conference presentation. There’s been a lot of hostility distracted towards the field during COVID, and sometimes it’s good to have a reminder to keep going in the face of adversity.
Another contributing cause: a lack of *serious* depth in epistemology, logic (various flavors), phenomenology/consciousness, mindfulness, and many other disciplines (or "woo woo's" as my science fan friends would say). Scientists like to tell us how complicated the world is....well, they haven't the slightest clue, science is only *one form of it*.
> But it’s the inevitability and divisiveness of the message that bothers me.
That too, but it's more so the ironic hubris - uninformed, and unaware of it.
Yesssssss x1000
Absolutely agree. I've been saying, since I recognized pieces of the issue in Summer 2020, that we did a poor job of communicating. We might convey data pretty well but if we did it in jargon and without explanation, we were not serving the public.
this is spot on
Nicely said Adam.
That is one way of putting it. I'd put it differently.
PH experts during COVID got way out of their lane of expertise. PH experts are supposed to know, be able to develop models, of how diseases spreads and the consequences of the spread. This information conveyed to individuals and policy makers would allow them to design an optimal response to the disease taking into account THEIR valuation of the outcomes in THEIR local conditions, THEIR risk tolerances, and THEIR knowledge of the costs of different ways of responding.
Instead, PH experts recommended what to do. Fore example, PH expertise can in principle tell a school principal how spread will occur among vaccinated/non-vaccinated teachers and students who are or are not tested for infectiousness in a facility that does/does not use determinized types of air filtration/sterilization systems. They cannot make the tradeoff of the value of decreased spread with the costs of the measures to reduce it, including the cost of disruption in learning. CDC's messaging allowed policy makers to claim whatever they did was just following CC guidance, when there should have BEEN o CDC "guidance."
In addition, the way that PH experts talked about vaccines, emphasizing "safety" over effectiveness, probably led to the public being OVERLY concerned about safety and reinforced vaccine hesitancy.
Perhaps these mistakes have been recognized internally, but they have not been acknowledged externally.
I don't think it's necessary an either/or. Those in public health can both work better to communicate ideas within their expertise, as well as being cautious about stepping outside their narrow expertise (alluded to in the 'what context are we missing?' and 'hearing perspectives that might be non-obvious to us' parts above). The distinction between scientific opinions and scientists-with-opinions is a point I made quite often during COVID (e.g. https://x.com/adamjkucharski/status/1358050473098571776?s=20 & https://x.com/adamjkucharski/status/1439160592040964097?s=20) - might elaborate more in a follow up post at some point.
Another way to pu my criticism was that PH officials made recommendations ot what to DO TO THE NEGLET of providing individuals and policy makers with the tools with which to make cost effective decisions, whether that's a problem of "looking down" or not.
Something you might not have appreciated was that, in public health, we were getting information so fast, and so much of it, we integrated the data and reached conclusions that were not wrong, but when we attempted to communicate these, what we often provided was data, and solutions based on our training and historical experience, and often prior planned responses based on modeling and data, but we did not provide Information. We failed to explain where our data and recommended actions originated from. We didn't tell you why our recommendation today was different from yesterday (in my case that well could have been the 20-30 research reports I'd read in that 24 hour period and the 2-3 hours of online chat with clinicians where we discussed what they were seeing in busy ICUs, and how their changes in procedures and treatments were working. That in addition to collecting the day's days, running my models, writing reports for my organization, and also my day job, attempting to summarize what I'd learned.
Another significant failing was that we often wrote and spoke in jargon to a greater or lesser degree, and while our terms were in English, our particular use of them was precise and exact in our little world, but might be interpreted in some other way by someone who read them and didn't possess the secret decoder ring.
Simply, from mid-January 2020 through 2021, I processed a lot of data, answered a lot of questions and wrote a lot of documentation about what we were learning, but honestly, I often did a poor job of communicating. Midway through 2021, the organization I was supporting, a nationwide Not-For-Profit, assigned a public affairs assistant to "translate" what I wrote. That effectively dropped my frequency and productivity because he and I would iterate every report to our leadership, but it did improve the actual communication. And honestly, it was an improvement. I'd known in the early months of the pandemic I was not as clear as I have been known to be when I was communicating one-on-one to a patient or family, but I felt like I had to try to communicate the whole of everything I'd learned. That was a mistake.
A similar phenomenon with Y2K when we were worried that all the computers would shut down because of the millennium....it didn’t happen because everyone put huge efforts into correcting the issue. Then all we heard was not ‘congratulations’ but absolute disbelief that the whole thing had been a scam. I wish we had a similar way to ‘fix COVID-19 but time is telling us this is a ‘horrific virus’!!
> I can understand why a public health researcher might share this message in a conference presentation. There’s been a lot of hostility distracted towards the field during COVID, and sometimes it’s good to have a reminder to keep going in the face of adversity.
Another contributing cause: a lack of *serious* depth in epistemology, logic (various flavors), phenomenology/consciousness, mindfulness, and many other disciplines (or "woo woo's" as my science fan friends would say). Scientists like to tell us how complicated the world is....well, they haven't the slightest clue, science is only *one form of it*.
> But it’s the inevitability and divisiveness of the message that bothers me.
That too, but it's more so the ironic hubris - uninformed, and unaware of it.