The government should change its way of explaining health risks to people and stay clear of using fear-mongering communication messages, a leading British statistician has warned.
The chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, Sir David referred to ads produced in 2021 that used images of doctors, nurses, and COVID-19 patients in oxygen masks alongside captions that said things like, “Look them in the eyes, and tell them the risk isn’t real.”
The campaign was meant to convince people to stay at home during government-mandated lockdowns.
Sir David argued that the ads were the worst possible way to communicate public health messages to Britons. He called the communication campaign, adopted by Downing Street, “one-sided [and] manipulative.”
He also compared it to a warning issued by the former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who in 2020 said, “Don’t kill your gran by catching coronavirus and passing it on.”
“The standard government communication is of telling you what to do, either through false reassurance or building up the fears. Both of these are deeply untrustworthy, appalling, and ineffective,” Sir David told the commission.
However, the Chief Executive of Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, whose hospital the advert and film were created in, had a different view at the time.
Trustworthy Communication
During COVID-19 lockdowns, the British government held regular press conferences to convey official messaging around the pandemic.Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson would be joined by medical advisers and health officials, including Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.
While Sir David criticised Mr. Johnson’s delivery, he said health officials were better at communicating health messages, including the risks and benefits of the vaccines.
“Politicians should not be delivering these messages. This is disastrous. Because they’re hopeless. They don’t understand basic messaging. They don’t understand that any [scientific] advice you’re giving is provisional and things may change. Politicians can’t change their minds because they get accused of U-turns,” he said.
Sir David also noted that “vaccine development, the vaccine rollout, the big clinical trials” were out of “political control and were not fronted in any political way.”
In March 2021, Mr. Johnson addressed public concerns over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, saying in a statement that “our vaccines are safe and effective.”
Sir David, however, argued that it was a simplistic and insufficient description that didn’t address the potential risks of blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“In trustworthy communication, one of the first things to do is preempt misinformation. Some people are just hopeless—there’s no way you can persuade them that you’re not injecting Bill Gates’s microchips. But a lot of people hear rumours, they read things, click on the internet to see all this stuff. That’s why you need reliable sources of information,” he told the commission.
The Times Health Commission was set up to advise on the future of health and social care in England in light of the pandemic.
It has been gathering evidence from senior doctors, scientists, business leaders, and politicians. The commission will issue a report with its conclusions in January 2024.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 Inquiry, set up to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, keeps holding public hearings with health experts and politicians.
This includes Mr. Hancock, former Health Secretary Sajid Javid, and former adviser to Mr. Johnson, Dominic Cummings.
