Doctors and journalists found themselves unprepared to face infodemia. Philip Rings, Chairman of the Federation national of Orders of doctors surgeons and dentists, is one of the personalities most involved in communicating the pandemic. The high toll of victims among doctors and the authoritative and prepared indications to face the emergency have placed the Order of doctors at the center of information. Here is the first part of the interview that lashes the scientific world and that of communication.
As a Federation of Medical Orders, how did you choose to communicate during this pandemic?
«Right from the start, with information and news overlapping at a fast pace, we understood that the citizen needed safe and reliable points of reference. We then brought together all the communications on Covid, which included, in addition to ours, also the official ones of Ministry of Health, AIFA e Higher Institute of Health, in a single section of the institutional portal. We have also implemented the production of cards, infographics, videos for our site Doctormaeveroche, aimed mainly at citizens, bringing them together, even here, under a single banner. The presence and activity on social networks has multiplied, even with content created ad hoc. Furthermore, we have tried to become point of reference also for journalists and the media as a verified source of information and news.
The results show good feed-back from both the media and citizens. 36.000, were, one year after the beginning of the epidemic, on 20 February 2020, the total releases (press, web, RTV) in the national media. To which were added those in the international, European, UK, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, American (USA and South American countries) press. Our site Dottoremeveroche, which has like mission to convey scientific information and correct lifestyles to citizens, has totaled millions of views, with peaks of 16 thousand clicks per tab on "hot" topics: are masks bad for your health? Do tampons damage the brain? You also more than double your social interactions.
Even our Fnomceo Tg Sanità, entirely dedicated to the initiatives of the Federation, has adapted to the new topics, rhythms and methods of communication, reporting on the pandemic every week in connection with the presidents of the most affected Orders.
In addition to this communication that we could define as “classic”, we have also added more innovative methods. Since 2018 we have chosen, like Fnomceo, to program communication campaigns, always aimed at the population, to be implemented with the posting of 6 by 3 meters posters in the main transit points of the cities, and with commercials in cinemas and on TV. During the pandemic, we wanted to dedicate these initiatives to the efforts and sacrifices made without saving, and even at the cost of life, by doctors. We have therefore achieved the campaign "I, doctor, swear", on the values expressed by the Code of Ethics and from the Oath. The spot "Every life counts", which recalls the saddest days of the pandemic and gives hope to get out of it, as well as the greeting cards for the beginning of the year.
Again as a tribute to doctors and nurses, we conceived and supported a series of virtual concerts, with the orchestral players playing at a distance inside colored squares, immediately renamed, for their resemblance to paintings, the "Mondrian Musicali". And we have broadcast, on Tv2000, a New Year's Concert, in memory of the fallen doctors and nurses and of all the victims of Covid ».
In your opinion, what were the errors and what are the distortions that characterized the information in the year of the covid? How, instead, should the media behave?
«The media reacted, right from the start, with the production and distribution of one incredible amount of news, even with alarmist tones and often in contradiction with each other. So much so that the World Health Organization, the main international institution that deals with the health of human beings, has coined the term "infodemic", precisely to indicate that "abundance of information, some accurate and some not, which makes it difficult for people to find reliable sources when they need it." Thus, while the virus spread globally, so did the news in a "viral" way. A rain of news, in which truth and falsity, rumors and confirmations, hypotheses, axioms, theorems, denials, redundancies, contradictions crossed and confused. Yet, the management of information is crucial from several points of view: for the control of the epidemic and for the effects it has on the population. Relapses that can be positive, with the adoption of correct lifestyles and active adherence to prevention rules. Or harmful to health and society: think of the episodes of intolerance towards Chinese citizens who lived in other countries, including Italy. Or to US citizens who ended up in the emergency room for drinking bleach or other disinfectants as an antidote to the coronavirus, a phenomenon that was amplified after a tweet from then President Donald Trump.
The authors of a study published in the journal Health Psychology, The novel coronavirus (COVID-2019) outbreak: Amplification of public health consequences by media exposure, say that, paradoxically, as journalists and institutions have worked to communicate information on risk assessments and recommendations to all, a related threat has emerged: psychological distress resulting from repeated media exposure to news about the epidemic.
This has implications not only for the immediate suffering in a population already struggling with an unprecedented health problem and the consequent economic repercussions, but also for the effects on physical and mental health over time.
The stress response can lead to help seeking behaviors that may be disproportionate or otherwise not recommended in response to the actual threat, resulting in an overload on health facilities and the use of available resources.
The same authors point out that those involved in emergency management tend to under-use social media as a source of risk communication. A strategic use of social media can instead be an effective way to communicate authoritative information to the public in the context of crisis communication.
Even the article Covid-19: "How to be careful with trust and expertise on social media", published on BMJ, underlines that "the communications in a public health crisis are crucial as much as medical intervention. In fact, the communication policies they are themselves a medical intervention".
After all, this Covid-19 has been defined the first pandemic in the time of social media, or at least in a context in which social media, from an almost niche phenomenon, or at least a nascent phenomenon, as they were in 2009, the year of the H1N1 pandemic, have taken on a massive and decisive role.
With this new awareness, we must take note that social media has moved quickly: Facebook has decided to eliminate false or misleading news from its platform and Instagram. An unprecedented move: in the past, faced with fake news reported by users or by the international network of subjects that are activated for a fact-checking action, they had not removed the contents but only reduced the diffusion of posts. The health risks have, this time, led to a more rigorous approach: also Twitter intervened by squeezing a agreement with the Ministry of Health, to whose account searches and hashtags on the #coronavirus theme are directed.
Le health organizations, the doctors he "an influencer”Of social media should actively drive online traffic to reliable sources. It could be the time when social media platforms take an active public health role and in parallel use banners, pop-ups and other tools to send messages directly to users.
And let's go back to "traditional" media and to what you define as "distortions". Analyzing the Italian scenario we can say that many newspapers have succumbed, some before and after, to the temptation of titles sensationalists e "Clickcatcher", when not overtly alarmist. This has led to a loss of public confidence in science, with cascading effects on compliance with the prevention rules first and on joining the vaccination campaign now. It is necessary re-establish a climate of trust, which is not obtained with unnecessarily optimistic, miraculous, but not alarmist messages either. Trust is earned communicating with calm tones and with intellectual honesty, and also succeeding in making it clear that scientific progress advances by trial and error, passing through adjustments and changes of course, and that knowledge grows precisely through constructive uncertainty, doubt, anchoring itself to the evidence that is gradually collected and never clinging to granite preconceptions.
The other "distortion" that was observed more in Italy than in other countries was that for which journalists relied on the so-called "experts": virologists, infectious diseases and epidemiologists spoke about coronavirus in the media, in an attempt to help information professionals to communicate science in the most correct and effective way possible. The use of experts, however, it contributed to polarize public opinion in different and diametrically opposed schools of thought. The scientific debate among the experts is a useful comparison, and is the basis of the progress of our knowledge. What sometimes fails to be understood, especially when this debate moves to the media level, is the sense of a divergence of opinions between scientists, opinions that do not concern data, evidence, but their interpretation in order to put to strategize and give advice. A recent work by sociologists Maximian Bucchi e Barbara Saracen for Science in Society Monitor, the observatory on the public perception of science in Italy by Observe, found that almost half of Italians are disoriented by the discrepancy in the advice given publicly by scientists, while 11% are convinced that it would be experts better give their advice in confidence. We must therefore all, starting with us doctors, researchers, up to the media, continue to study, together with science communication experts, to identify the most effective tools to involve citizens in policies useful for their health. We must do this especially now, when hesitant communication about vaccines can put the vaccination campaign at serious risk.
We doctors we have to admit ours errors level of communication, due to the fact of having been thrown from the clinic, from the laboratories, to the media spotlight. Without being prepared to handle it, without having the tools. In the same way, and perhaps it is even more difficult, when dealing with information professionals, journalists and the media have to do it. And the biggest mistake, in my opinion, was that of having abdicated their intermediary role, to entrust it to experts who did not have the tools. Several factors played a role in this: the refusal, by the mainstream media, to rely on scientific and medical journalists, who know the topics they are talking about and how to communicate them. And the waiver, by "generalist" journalists, forced from one day to the next to take care of health and health, and therefore to play on a less known terrain, at that critical thinking that must distinguish their profession, to become "guard dogs of democracy", without following the sirens of those who seemed more authoritative at that moment or, worse, of those who corroborated their thesis. Evidence builds science, not opinions, not even people, not even scientists; not even the Nobel Prizes. The journalist has the duty to inquire about the evidence, and to transmit it, through his intermediation, to the citizens "
END Part one - CONTINUE
