Trust the Science...

How you communicate the science is really important

I have used the term "Trust the science" in the past, but usually when it wasn't quite so fluid as it was during COVID (and for the record, COVID-19 is still an issue regardless of how many emergency declarations have been discarded). There are several issues to unpack here.

The COVID-19 pandemic may well have been the first where the whole world got to see how a lot of our public health, clinical treatment and viriology/vaccinology science unfolded. And it was messy. I've been involved in several disparate fields during a long and busy career, but perhaps the ugliest was medicine. In biomedical engineering, geodetics, meteorology, I never had someone stand up at a conference and shout at me, literally, for reporting my findings. I've had that at medical conferences, and in the course of the Pandemic, I've gotten the social media, and email variants thereof. But worse than having colleagues who were entitled to an opinion based on years of study and research in the arena, I got this from people who had little or no experience, but were able to see all the things that were happening. I was writing in English, but often in what amounted to a professional shorthand. The public would see what I, or a colleague, wrote, and the words all made sense... but they lacked the context of the discussion, and as a result, drew conclusions that were not even consistent with what we might be discussing.

Science is messy. A hypothesis might become a theory, subjected to rigorous evaluation (or not!) and "proven" or dispelled. If proven, it's still subject to review and attempts to reproduce results by others who might not be so wedded to said theory as you are, and might subsequently find flaws or outright discredit it. This doesn't mean the process is wrong, or that the original researcher was dishonest, but I've been told I was, indeed, dishonest when new data caused me to rather suddenly change my opinion and understanding of the subject, and then have to publish what amounted to a retraction, AND explanation. During the pandemic, I saw sufficient material to change an opinion or understanding of the process of the disease more than once per day, all too many times. Read an article reporting a series of research that was, indeed, well-designed, properly conducted, and reasonably analyzed, only to have another author report, nearly simultaneously, a result that was as carefully curated as the first, but cast all the earlier work into question. Because that was the nature of the disease we were trying to chase.

We also saw changes in understanding of the disease process itself, but these were not discerned through careful trials and rigorous control, but rather by an astute clinician, or several, seeing something that wasn't consistent with what we'd been thinking we would see, and discussing it. Online. I spent a lot of time on a couple of closed Facebook groups with critical care clinicians where we talked about what was being seen in a number of widely separated hospital settings. A lot changed in what we knew of the disease process, but trying to explain this to the public meant we had to tear down strawmen of the disease process we, ourselves had helped build, explain why we had changed our understanding, and in some cases, beg forgiveness. And yes, the public was watching.

One other thing: I was reading a lot of case reports, case studies, research reports, etc., and trying to formulate a coherent view, and share my notes with colleagues. I honestly didn't have a lot of spare time to do other things. Like family, normal living, etc. As a result, I lost a bit of my own humanity, and as well, patience with people who couldn't see what I was seeing. My writing became more steeped in both the reported data, and worse, in the jargon we were accumulating around the Pandemic. I wasn't communicating with the public, and even my wife, with a medical background, complained I wasn't saying things that made sense to her (her background, in womens' health, is often foreign to me, at least when she goes into the minutia of obstetrics and gynecology, much as my cardiovascular medicine background causes her to go to sleep), which should have been a red flag to rethink how I was trying to communicate. But I wasn't alone. Within the public health community, I saw too many examples of what were hastily created, if stellar scholarly pieces put out into the light... that were completely unintelligible to the public.

Finally, tribalism perfused the whole discussion all to early in the process. From claiming the outbreak of a truly novel virus was not worth a public health emergency (I still disagree with that belief) to statements on the other side that we'd all die if we didn't isolate, mask, handwash, and wipe down our every surrounding object, there was little effort made toward civility in the discussion.

Overall, I wish we could have manipulated the Pandemic behind our academic walls and within the ivory towers as we always had, provided best practice (as of today) guidance, and not had the public see just how human we really are. But I don’t really want to hide the process from scrutiny, rather protect the public form our messy ways. Because, next time they need us, The Public is going to remember watching us, feeling like we weren't honest with them (or worse), and will try even harder to second-guess what we're doing. Or, we'll see legislation that will limit what we can do, and subsequently see the persecution of the scientists who failed to protect the world from the next outbreak.