Spot on. Old enough to remember when we had a real public health system with public health depts that did more than collect stats. We had public health nurses that visited with people, tracked contacts and were an integral part of the community. Horrifying to see public health become politicized. The CDC publicly stating they were changing guidelines to consider the economic impact was mind blowing and showed they have lost all claims to legitimacy. I'm a retired FNP. The CDC used to be my go to. I now use you as a resource first followed by some other international sites. It is extremely hard to find a reliable source that has scientific basis without political penetration shaping it's narrative
Agreed. I (pediatrician here) posted a reel on my instagram about this very topic of drinking infected milk and asked on stories how many of my audience drink raw milk. Staggeringly few drink raw milk despite the way that many perceive EVERYONE ELSE as drinking raw milk based on tiktoks and instagrams.
I think it helps to share the mental math as a trusted resource on how we categorize and weigh risk.
Do I drink raw milk? No....we just don't drink much cow's milk period and it seems like a lot of work to go about even getting raw milk if i was so inclined.
Do i lose sleep over people drinking raw milk if they wish (hopefully from someone following the raw milk standards)? Also no.
Is drinking infected raw milk a good plan to protect against H5N1? Big no specifically because we have evidence of infection from animals.
If we as the trusted messengers turn everything into a catastrophe it's really hard to keep our audience engaged but when we instead focus on how we arrive at our recommendations, the limits of our knowledge, and how much weight we give to our reccomendations.
I cheered through so much of this piece, and I feel you are spot on! As someone who has worked on social media campaigns for health initiatives, I have seen that it was not really about my Facebook posts, it was about teaching the front-line health workers (community health workers, faith leaders, CBOs, etc) the information, answering their questions so that they could answer community questions, and then the Facebook post was a secondary touch point to re-iterate what they had said.
To respond to some comments regarding this not working - it *may* face challenges, BUT it works. My parents decided to never get the covid vaccine, but my education campaign means they are still taking precautions and protecting themselves from getting covid. It takes time and relationship building to reach the intricate spaces, but this is our BEST shot. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved, but a trusted messenger may plant a seed.
Agreed! Planting the seed is all that you can do. Even if you can't change the mind of someone who's mad a decision you can promote safer behaviours and also possibly stimulate those around them to ask questions rather than follow their lead
As one of your “Jo on the street” subscribers I appreciate this. I subscribe because I wasn’t getting any of them information I wanted from my PCP who I like but just had no answers to questions re vaccines ( I’m super pro just wanted some help with determining best timing and she just had no thoughts). She clearly wasn’t reading much about it. And I like being able to say to friends who sometimes catastrophize Covid that, “no Covid isn’t more prevalent than ever right now. YLE actually says it’s currently low but you know there are summer spikes so enjoy it now”
I totally agree with this as a PCP, there were many of us who just didn’t take the baton and run when we needed to. There was just so much information to learn, but that’s part of our job.
As a primary care doc I tried to deploy both scientific reasoning with my patients, but also was not above the anecdote and story to help people understand and buy-in (vaccines, boosters, masks,etc) That’s what storytelling is all about - communication, understanding, and persuasion.
Unfortunately, storytelling can also be wielded by bad actors, fearmongerers, and think-conspiracy-first types.
Thanks Katelyn. You’re certainly a trusted, well-informed, able communicator.
@Jo A and @ Dr McCormick: Self-education and a life-long dedication to reading is paramount for physicians as well as anyone dealing in health care issues. As Sir William Osler, MD opined: “It is astonishing with how little reading a physician can practice medicine, but it is not so astonishing how badly he (and she) may do so”. When the topic is important and you aren’t clear in your own mind then look it up, I say. The instant availability of the internet provides all clinicians with a means to clarify issues of science and medicine and then it’s imperative for the clinician to provide “the best available therapy” based on his/her interpretation. There is NO mandate that a clinician should declared a patient “comfort care” and ignore his/her own innovative/novel approach to a disorder such as we saw with post-acute COVID19 victims - mechanically ventilated, sustained with feeding tubes, IV’s etc specifically Afterall, the practitioner’s education began in medical school but his/her education is life-long. If the answers are not forthcoming (“she clearly wasn’t reading much about it…” as Jo A described) then the bond of a patient-physician relationship is sorely lacking and advocacy is non-existent. When our medical team was confronted with the post-acute COVID19 victims in our recovery hospital, we had NO guidance, NO precedent therapies. We had our own education and experiences with a myriad of disorders and one in particular became the basis for our approach to a therapy that proved repeatedly and consistently successful. The clinicians that referred to us opined that they had done all they could do, but they lacked curiosity, empathy, and desire to “find a credible approach” based upon the pathophysiologies of the disorder. In many instances they were mandated to follow only official protocols and yet the mortality and morbidity under those protocols was mounting. I agree that “vaccines do not equate to vaccinations”. Not all will accept that science as beneficial as it has been for this and many other infectious disorders. But medical science has been remiss by not digging deeper into therapeutics to complement those amazing vaccines. Even worse, the focus on therapeutics is on pure antivirals rather than a multisystems approach that involves the viral and viral-host immune targets we believe are the “command and control” targets for the disorder. Basic science research has not been ignored but, sadly, the research is often buried in Journals that Clinicians do not read partly because of the complexities of cellular biology and immunology. It’s not an impossible task and it takes some effort. Any clinician with advanced education is capable of understanding the concepts even if some of the terms are new. There are repurposed drugs “left on the table” and should be further scrutinized even if the debacles of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have “poisoned that water”. Part of the issue is that repurposing often equates to no return on investment (ROI) so research based upon commercializing even these well-studied and continuously used drugs, is being cast aside. Taxpaying victims of COVID19 surely would not be sad with little or no ROI for amplifying the use to other disorders. Our repurposed approach is based on a safe drug with 40+ years of world-wide use and priced locally at $5.90/10 tablets vs Paxlovid at MSRP $1390/10 capsules or $350+ co-pay for insured, in one scenario. So, Vaccine research is needed, predictably, the virus has shown its capacity to circumvent vaccines as well as monoclonal antibodies since the ultimate neuroreceptor targets remain vulnerable. A multitherapeutic drug is what is needed in our view.
Ref:
Lykhmus O, Kalashnyk O, Sullivan R Jr, Skok M. Hydroxyurea interaction with α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor can underlie its therapeutic efficacy upon COVID-19. J Neuroimmunol. 2023 Dec 15;385:578244. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroim.2023.578244. Epub 2023 Nov 21. PMID: 38016403.
Ref:
Skok M. The role of α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in post-acute sequelae of covid-19. Int J Biochem Cell Biol. 2024 Mar;168:106519. doi: 10.1016/j.biocel.2024.106519. Epub 2024 Jan 11. PMID: 38218363.
Yes!!! These are fundamental aspects of community organization. Find what anthropologists call "key informants" and add "key informers" to their roles. The scientists at institutions need the help of these folks and smart people in a anthropology and advertising to disseminate information AND to help the audience tolerate the vagaries and uncertainties of scientific findings as they evolve. Thank you, again for these excellent communiques. You are an important voice.... Jonathan
...Brilliant. And not just applicable to all public health...applicable to all publically relevant and community impactful information. Great piece. So admire your work.🙏
When I believe that I cannot be deceived I am deceived already. Humility is important. Yet our culture is conditioned to "one correct answer". When uncertainty is part of a message many reject the source as unreliable. Ours is a fallen and falling world. May we have confidence that there is objective truth and seek to live by it.
Another excellent piece. We see ourselves as among the "trusted messengers", reaching out to other "trusted messengers", but that trust has to be earned. Too many knowledgeable people I know look down on those who haven't accepted the message--humility and respect are crucial to earning trust. Similarly, just assuming that our superior wisdom will reach the doubters is a recipe for failure. Covid should have taught us that simply repeating "trust the science" when the science was uncertain and shifting--and the definitions of "misinformation" were often driven by politics--won't work, and is in fact destructive. Humility and respect.
Email-gate - deleted emails and use of personal email accounts by Fauci’s inner circle despite strict prohibitions against such practices - isn’t helping government officials to be seen as trusted messengers, let alone trusted period.
Seriously? We're dealing with multiple infectious diseases, conspiracy mongers who want you to drink raw milk, politically motivated programs to increase diseases like measles (because, you know, it's "natural immunity" and you can't trust guys like Fauci), discredited COVID conspiracy theories, and THIS is what you choose to focus on?
As we used to say back in the day, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Comments like this one of yours are definitely NOT part of the solution.
This is about a debate between RootClaim - a group which espouses a "Lab Leak" theory for CoVid and a skeptic Peter Miller, who was assisted by a technical expert Shin Ji Yong.
The essence of this is that the evidence that CoVID is the result of a lab leak is quite weak. RootClaim had put up a USD $100,000 prize for the winner of this debate (RootClaim suggested that the evidence pointed to a lab leak). Two judges with technical expertise were agreed to by RootClaim & Miller/Shin Jie Yong. Shin Jie Yong has technical expertise, and Miller is a computer programmer/analyst who has written extensively on CoVID issues. IMO, he writes well about these issues.
In the end, the judges considered that the evidence presented did NOT point to a lab leak as the likely origin.
While I agree that the Chinese government can not be relied to tell the truth on this matter, and so some suspicion is warranted, I have not heard compelling arguments that CoVID was anything other than an ordinary Animal to Human jump...
@Bill Hepler: The blame-makers appear to have little appreciation for the complexities of inter-species genetic transfers as a natural phenomenon. Not all transfers remain viable in the recipient organism (people included) but under the right circumstances it is feasible. It’s far easier to find an explanation utilizing the blame-game rather than educating oneself. Osler was right……
You nailed it Katelyn. As I’ve said before, you were my primary source of information as a Chief Medical Officer during the pandemic. I was a trusted source in our community (for the most part 😉). You might enjoy a book called, The Death of Expertise (The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters) by Tom Nichols.
Unfortunately in our current world "trusted messengers" are often people who think alike. The thought membrane is all but impenetrable. Regardless who you may think partnering with will have an impact, you're likely to hit a dead end. When I worked in a corporate silo 40 years ago, we had two sayings that summarized this resistance to outside thought…
Dare to be cautious.
Tell me anything as long as it's what I want to hear.
I couldn't agree more. I have a bunch of trusted messengers, of which you are one. They have been my lifeline as things get harder and harder to keep a handle on. You, Dr. Jeremy Faust, Caitlyn Rivers, Rick Bright, Michael ?, Eric Topol, and a few others whose names escape me but I recognize immediately if I hear or see them. If any of these people are talking, I'm listening.
What can we do to help? Do you have knowledge of any 501(c)3s out there who are doing good, effective work to fill the gap by spreading the information where it’s needed?
Your newsletter has been instrumental for me in determining my path and how to discuss these issues with family, older parents, friends, & colleagues. Is there something else I can do to help broaden the reach?
I’ve been working towards building a non-profit for this exact purpose for the past year. Unfortunately all the billionaires aren’t excited about it. Will keep pushing. Thanks for validating this idea!
Your analysis is outstanding, as always, Dr. Jetelina. That is why you have earned our trust.
Having been Commissioner of the public health agency in a large state during the pandemic, my take-away lesson is the critical, primary importance of what is known as Crisis Communication (CC).
CC is germane to the topic of trusted messengers because on a national scale, our Crisis Communication efforts came up short. Because CC was lacking, over time, trust eroded and no adequate, effective efforts were undertaken to earn public confidence so that that confidence would translate into trust and that trust result in more effective action: more people spared serious illness and death. We paid a higher cost than we needed to and we owe it to ourselves and the ones we love to learn from that terrible nightmare that was the emergency phase of the pandemic. [SARS-CoV-2 is still with us, BTW.]
For me, effective Crisis Communication has four key elements:
1) The trusted source must be first with all pertinent information - that is not easy with all the light-speed communication that now swarms around us, especially if some of those voices are bent on disinformation.
2) Be clear about what is known and what is not known and prepare the public that as knowledge accumulates, recommendations and guidance will change. That is a good thing, since better knowledge informs more effective policy & guidance.
3) Give people ways to protect themselves and the ones they love.
4) Explain - in accessible language - how and why these countermeasures work and, most importantly, how following them will benefit the individual and those they love; and what risks accrue to the individual and community if those countermeasures are not widely practiced.
Dr. Jetelina, I believe the analysis I present will ring true for many of your readers. The failure of effective CC in the early stages of the COVID pandemic laid the groundwork for mis- and disinformation to run rampant. The result is that for far too many loud and influential voices, the message now is "The government is stupid at best and lying at worst. If you're smart, you will do the opposite of what they tell you." Our potential adversaries around the globe see sowing disinformation as the biggest bang for the ruble that money can buy.
I and many others believe this state of affairs poses a genuine risk to our national security. I know that sounds like an exaggerated scare tactic. I assure you, I and others are quite sober in this assessment.
There is a great book by Juliette Kayyen entitled "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters." Dr. Kayyan is an expert in emergence preparedness and response. Her primary point is that disasters WILL happen. History is not over. The next national-scale disaster may not be a pandemic, but it will be something, and more often than not, something eminently foreseeable.
I know in my heart that Dr. Kayyen is correct. I wish it were not so.
Given that it is so - that it is inevitable that we will face some national-scale disaster / emergency, probably within our lifetimes - we need to restore confidence and therefore trust in the only institutions that have the legitimate authority, capability, capacity, and duty to shepherd society through crisis.
Once again, Dr. Jetelina has proposed an entirely practical and potentially very effective plan for how that confidence can be restored via grass-roots truth-telling - we can and must be effective Crisis Communicators with our families, colleagues and communities.
Only we can do that. Take heart: we are not alone.
I saw this exact scenario happen during the height of the pandemic, with a federal pandemic relief program managed by a government agency for which my company was an applicant. Communications from the agency were bureaucratic and opaque, and the agency was not very responsive (probably overwhelmed with questions). I ended up finding out about and joining a Facebook group where one person served as the 'trusted messenger' for all of us, getting information from the agency and then sharing it and making it understandable for the group. That person should have been compensated for their work somehow -- they were a lifesaver!
Spot on. Old enough to remember when we had a real public health system with public health depts that did more than collect stats. We had public health nurses that visited with people, tracked contacts and were an integral part of the community. Horrifying to see public health become politicized. The CDC publicly stating they were changing guidelines to consider the economic impact was mind blowing and showed they have lost all claims to legitimacy. I'm a retired FNP. The CDC used to be my go to. I now use you as a resource first followed by some other international sites. It is extremely hard to find a reliable source that has scientific basis without political penetration shaping it's narrative
Agreed. I (pediatrician here) posted a reel on my instagram about this very topic of drinking infected milk and asked on stories how many of my audience drink raw milk. Staggeringly few drink raw milk despite the way that many perceive EVERYONE ELSE as drinking raw milk based on tiktoks and instagrams.
I think it helps to share the mental math as a trusted resource on how we categorize and weigh risk.
Do I drink raw milk? No....we just don't drink much cow's milk period and it seems like a lot of work to go about even getting raw milk if i was so inclined.
Do i lose sleep over people drinking raw milk if they wish (hopefully from someone following the raw milk standards)? Also no.
Is drinking infected raw milk a good plan to protect against H5N1? Big no specifically because we have evidence of infection from animals.
If we as the trusted messengers turn everything into a catastrophe it's really hard to keep our audience engaged but when we instead focus on how we arrive at our recommendations, the limits of our knowledge, and how much weight we give to our reccomendations.
I cheered through so much of this piece, and I feel you are spot on! As someone who has worked on social media campaigns for health initiatives, I have seen that it was not really about my Facebook posts, it was about teaching the front-line health workers (community health workers, faith leaders, CBOs, etc) the information, answering their questions so that they could answer community questions, and then the Facebook post was a secondary touch point to re-iterate what they had said.
To respond to some comments regarding this not working - it *may* face challenges, BUT it works. My parents decided to never get the covid vaccine, but my education campaign means they are still taking precautions and protecting themselves from getting covid. It takes time and relationship building to reach the intricate spaces, but this is our BEST shot. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved, but a trusted messenger may plant a seed.
Agreed! Planting the seed is all that you can do. Even if you can't change the mind of someone who's mad a decision you can promote safer behaviours and also possibly stimulate those around them to ask questions rather than follow their lead
As one of your “Jo on the street” subscribers I appreciate this. I subscribe because I wasn’t getting any of them information I wanted from my PCP who I like but just had no answers to questions re vaccines ( I’m super pro just wanted some help with determining best timing and she just had no thoughts). She clearly wasn’t reading much about it. And I like being able to say to friends who sometimes catastrophize Covid that, “no Covid isn’t more prevalent than ever right now. YLE actually says it’s currently low but you know there are summer spikes so enjoy it now”
I totally agree with this as a PCP, there were many of us who just didn’t take the baton and run when we needed to. There was just so much information to learn, but that’s part of our job.
As a primary care doc I tried to deploy both scientific reasoning with my patients, but also was not above the anecdote and story to help people understand and buy-in (vaccines, boosters, masks,etc) That’s what storytelling is all about - communication, understanding, and persuasion.
Unfortunately, storytelling can also be wielded by bad actors, fearmongerers, and think-conspiracy-first types.
Thanks Katelyn. You’re certainly a trusted, well-informed, able communicator.
The “Joe on the street” readers are fantastic too!! So glad it’s been useful to yiu
@Jo A and @ Dr McCormick: Self-education and a life-long dedication to reading is paramount for physicians as well as anyone dealing in health care issues. As Sir William Osler, MD opined: “It is astonishing with how little reading a physician can practice medicine, but it is not so astonishing how badly he (and she) may do so”. When the topic is important and you aren’t clear in your own mind then look it up, I say. The instant availability of the internet provides all clinicians with a means to clarify issues of science and medicine and then it’s imperative for the clinician to provide “the best available therapy” based on his/her interpretation. There is NO mandate that a clinician should declared a patient “comfort care” and ignore his/her own innovative/novel approach to a disorder such as we saw with post-acute COVID19 victims - mechanically ventilated, sustained with feeding tubes, IV’s etc specifically Afterall, the practitioner’s education began in medical school but his/her education is life-long. If the answers are not forthcoming (“she clearly wasn’t reading much about it…” as Jo A described) then the bond of a patient-physician relationship is sorely lacking and advocacy is non-existent. When our medical team was confronted with the post-acute COVID19 victims in our recovery hospital, we had NO guidance, NO precedent therapies. We had our own education and experiences with a myriad of disorders and one in particular became the basis for our approach to a therapy that proved repeatedly and consistently successful. The clinicians that referred to us opined that they had done all they could do, but they lacked curiosity, empathy, and desire to “find a credible approach” based upon the pathophysiologies of the disorder. In many instances they were mandated to follow only official protocols and yet the mortality and morbidity under those protocols was mounting. I agree that “vaccines do not equate to vaccinations”. Not all will accept that science as beneficial as it has been for this and many other infectious disorders. But medical science has been remiss by not digging deeper into therapeutics to complement those amazing vaccines. Even worse, the focus on therapeutics is on pure antivirals rather than a multisystems approach that involves the viral and viral-host immune targets we believe are the “command and control” targets for the disorder. Basic science research has not been ignored but, sadly, the research is often buried in Journals that Clinicians do not read partly because of the complexities of cellular biology and immunology. It’s not an impossible task and it takes some effort. Any clinician with advanced education is capable of understanding the concepts even if some of the terms are new. There are repurposed drugs “left on the table” and should be further scrutinized even if the debacles of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin have “poisoned that water”. Part of the issue is that repurposing often equates to no return on investment (ROI) so research based upon commercializing even these well-studied and continuously used drugs, is being cast aside. Taxpaying victims of COVID19 surely would not be sad with little or no ROI for amplifying the use to other disorders. Our repurposed approach is based on a safe drug with 40+ years of world-wide use and priced locally at $5.90/10 tablets vs Paxlovid at MSRP $1390/10 capsules or $350+ co-pay for insured, in one scenario. So, Vaccine research is needed, predictably, the virus has shown its capacity to circumvent vaccines as well as monoclonal antibodies since the ultimate neuroreceptor targets remain vulnerable. A multitherapeutic drug is what is needed in our view.
Ref:
Lykhmus O, Kalashnyk O, Sullivan R Jr, Skok M. Hydroxyurea interaction with α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor can underlie its therapeutic efficacy upon COVID-19. J Neuroimmunol. 2023 Dec 15;385:578244. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroim.2023.578244. Epub 2023 Nov 21. PMID: 38016403.
Ref:
Skok M. The role of α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in post-acute sequelae of covid-19. Int J Biochem Cell Biol. 2024 Mar;168:106519. doi: 10.1016/j.biocel.2024.106519. Epub 2024 Jan 11. PMID: 38218363.
Yes!!! These are fundamental aspects of community organization. Find what anthropologists call "key informants" and add "key informers" to their roles. The scientists at institutions need the help of these folks and smart people in a anthropology and advertising to disseminate information AND to help the audience tolerate the vagaries and uncertainties of scientific findings as they evolve. Thank you, again for these excellent communiques. You are an important voice.... Jonathan
...Brilliant. And not just applicable to all public health...applicable to all publically relevant and community impactful information. Great piece. So admire your work.🙏
When I believe that I cannot be deceived I am deceived already. Humility is important. Yet our culture is conditioned to "one correct answer". When uncertainty is part of a message many reject the source as unreliable. Ours is a fallen and falling world. May we have confidence that there is objective truth and seek to live by it.
AMEN!!
Another excellent piece. We see ourselves as among the "trusted messengers", reaching out to other "trusted messengers", but that trust has to be earned. Too many knowledgeable people I know look down on those who haven't accepted the message--humility and respect are crucial to earning trust. Similarly, just assuming that our superior wisdom will reach the doubters is a recipe for failure. Covid should have taught us that simply repeating "trust the science" when the science was uncertain and shifting--and the definitions of "misinformation" were often driven by politics--won't work, and is in fact destructive. Humility and respect.
Couldn’t agree more.
Email-gate - deleted emails and use of personal email accounts by Fauci’s inner circle despite strict prohibitions against such practices - isn’t helping government officials to be seen as trusted messengers, let alone trusted period.
Seriously? We're dealing with multiple infectious diseases, conspiracy mongers who want you to drink raw milk, politically motivated programs to increase diseases like measles (because, you know, it's "natural immunity" and you can't trust guys like Fauci), discredited COVID conspiracy theories, and THIS is what you choose to focus on?
As we used to say back in the day, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Comments like this one of yours are definitely NOT part of the solution.
The deletion of emails has been demonstrated, though as to whether it is helpful or not to point this out is in the eye of the beholder. See oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SSCP-Staff-Memo_Morens-5.22.pdf and usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/fauci-aide-make-emails-disappear-including-smoking-guns/
Yep. I find voices I trusted not to be as trustworthy. What do we do then?
It’s so disappointing. I was a huge Fauci fan, though I’ve never bought the “animal at wet market” line.
You might be interested in this:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/my-friend-won-the-us-100-000-debate-on-the-origin-of-covid-19-8a9d3f719ce9
Various accounts of the debate:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/28hnPFiAoMkJssmf3/most-experts-believe-covid-19-was-probably-not-a-lab-leak/comment/d4PckHwuvX8iHg32u
Peter Miller's channel on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAkFdX3wuVwBd7ZgMG7tdow
Root Claims account of debate is at: rootclaim.com
This is about a debate between RootClaim - a group which espouses a "Lab Leak" theory for CoVid and a skeptic Peter Miller, who was assisted by a technical expert Shin Ji Yong.
The essence of this is that the evidence that CoVID is the result of a lab leak is quite weak. RootClaim had put up a USD $100,000 prize for the winner of this debate (RootClaim suggested that the evidence pointed to a lab leak). Two judges with technical expertise were agreed to by RootClaim & Miller/Shin Jie Yong. Shin Jie Yong has technical expertise, and Miller is a computer programmer/analyst who has written extensively on CoVID issues. IMO, he writes well about these issues.
In the end, the judges considered that the evidence presented did NOT point to a lab leak as the likely origin.
While I agree that the Chinese government can not be relied to tell the truth on this matter, and so some suspicion is warranted, I have not heard compelling arguments that CoVID was anything other than an ordinary Animal to Human jump...
@Bill Hepler: The blame-makers appear to have little appreciation for the complexities of inter-species genetic transfers as a natural phenomenon. Not all transfers remain viable in the recipient organism (people included) but under the right circumstances it is feasible. It’s far easier to find an explanation utilizing the blame-game rather than educating oneself. Osler was right……
You nailed it Katelyn. As I’ve said before, you were my primary source of information as a Chief Medical Officer during the pandemic. I was a trusted source in our community (for the most part 😉). You might enjoy a book called, The Death of Expertise (The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters) by Tom Nichols.
I actually just bought that!! Someone in YLE community suggested it. Look forward to digging in soon
Unfortunately in our current world "trusted messengers" are often people who think alike. The thought membrane is all but impenetrable. Regardless who you may think partnering with will have an impact, you're likely to hit a dead end. When I worked in a corporate silo 40 years ago, we had two sayings that summarized this resistance to outside thought…
Dare to be cautious.
Tell me anything as long as it's what I want to hear.
I couldn't agree more. I have a bunch of trusted messengers, of which you are one. They have been my lifeline as things get harder and harder to keep a handle on. You, Dr. Jeremy Faust, Caitlyn Rivers, Rick Bright, Michael ?, Eric Topol, and a few others whose names escape me but I recognize immediately if I hear or see them. If any of these people are talking, I'm listening.
What can we do to help? Do you have knowledge of any 501(c)3s out there who are doing good, effective work to fill the gap by spreading the information where it’s needed?
Your newsletter has been instrumental for me in determining my path and how to discuss these issues with family, older parents, friends, & colleagues. Is there something else I can do to help broaden the reach?
I’ve been working towards building a non-profit for this exact purpose for the past year. Unfortunately all the billionaires aren’t excited about it. Will keep pushing. Thanks for validating this idea!
Your analysis is outstanding, as always, Dr. Jetelina. That is why you have earned our trust.
Having been Commissioner of the public health agency in a large state during the pandemic, my take-away lesson is the critical, primary importance of what is known as Crisis Communication (CC).
CC is germane to the topic of trusted messengers because on a national scale, our Crisis Communication efforts came up short. Because CC was lacking, over time, trust eroded and no adequate, effective efforts were undertaken to earn public confidence so that that confidence would translate into trust and that trust result in more effective action: more people spared serious illness and death. We paid a higher cost than we needed to and we owe it to ourselves and the ones we love to learn from that terrible nightmare that was the emergency phase of the pandemic. [SARS-CoV-2 is still with us, BTW.]
For me, effective Crisis Communication has four key elements:
1) The trusted source must be first with all pertinent information - that is not easy with all the light-speed communication that now swarms around us, especially if some of those voices are bent on disinformation.
2) Be clear about what is known and what is not known and prepare the public that as knowledge accumulates, recommendations and guidance will change. That is a good thing, since better knowledge informs more effective policy & guidance.
3) Give people ways to protect themselves and the ones they love.
4) Explain - in accessible language - how and why these countermeasures work and, most importantly, how following them will benefit the individual and those they love; and what risks accrue to the individual and community if those countermeasures are not widely practiced.
Dr. Jetelina, I believe the analysis I present will ring true for many of your readers. The failure of effective CC in the early stages of the COVID pandemic laid the groundwork for mis- and disinformation to run rampant. The result is that for far too many loud and influential voices, the message now is "The government is stupid at best and lying at worst. If you're smart, you will do the opposite of what they tell you." Our potential adversaries around the globe see sowing disinformation as the biggest bang for the ruble that money can buy.
I and many others believe this state of affairs poses a genuine risk to our national security. I know that sounds like an exaggerated scare tactic. I assure you, I and others are quite sober in this assessment.
There is a great book by Juliette Kayyen entitled "The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters." Dr. Kayyan is an expert in emergence preparedness and response. Her primary point is that disasters WILL happen. History is not over. The next national-scale disaster may not be a pandemic, but it will be something, and more often than not, something eminently foreseeable.
I know in my heart that Dr. Kayyen is correct. I wish it were not so.
Given that it is so - that it is inevitable that we will face some national-scale disaster / emergency, probably within our lifetimes - we need to restore confidence and therefore trust in the only institutions that have the legitimate authority, capability, capacity, and duty to shepherd society through crisis.
Once again, Dr. Jetelina has proposed an entirely practical and potentially very effective plan for how that confidence can be restored via grass-roots truth-telling - we can and must be effective Crisis Communicators with our families, colleagues and communities.
Only we can do that. Take heart: we are not alone.
Tens of thousands of seals and sea lions are died of H5N1 along Argentine beaches last year. I saw ONE article in the New York Times. If that had been more highly publicized, I think that people would be more alarmed about the spread to mammals. Here's the link to share: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/health/birdflu-marine-mammals.html?unlocked_article_code=1.v00.KJ95.TRmxwo-6VaXH&smid=url-share
I saw this exact scenario happen during the height of the pandemic, with a federal pandemic relief program managed by a government agency for which my company was an applicant. Communications from the agency were bureaucratic and opaque, and the agency was not very responsive (probably overwhelmed with questions). I ended up finding out about and joining a Facebook group where one person served as the 'trusted messenger' for all of us, getting information from the agency and then sharing it and making it understandable for the group. That person should have been compensated for their work somehow -- they were a lifesaver!