Epidemiologist Michael Baker to head new public health communication project

Epidemiologist Michael Baker, who was a leading voice during New Zealand’s Covid-19 response, is launching a new project aimed at strengthening communication between researchers and the wider community.

He will be the director of the Public Health Communication Centre, an independent organisation funded by the philanthropic Gama Foundation.

Baker said New Zealand already had some of the best public health initiatives in the world, but there was still room to improve, especially for Māori and Pacifica.

A lot of the job would involve connecting key players in the public health area where institutions such as the Science Media Centre had already had great success, Baker said.

“I will be working closely with journalists, we have excellent science and health journalists, but not enough of them, so it’s to provide them with more information so they can communicate more widely.”

Other parts of the role would include keeping policy makers up-to-date with advances in science, as well as in some key areas holding them to account, and giving the public and health practitioners practical information that they could use, Baker said.

It would be a much wider role than just dealing with Covid-19 issues, Baker said.

“The purpose is really around advancing health, improving equity and supporting a healthy sustainable environment - they’re really critical areas.”

Health equity was a critical area with a seven-year gap between Māori and non-Māori life expectancy, Baker said.

Baker said he had done a lot of work on the history of pandemics.

“We can look at a century of flu pandemics - 1918, 1957, 2009 - and seeing Māori having much higher mortality over a century and unfortunately history’s repeating itself with Covid-19.”

That was why an agency such as Te Aka Whai Ora - Māori Health Authority was critically needed to give more leadership in that area, Baker said.

Disinformation in the health area, particularly around Covid-19, was a major problem, he said.

“We do need to really address this because I think it’s eroding support for a lot of key public health measures ... and that’s one of the areas we want to work on with this new centre.”

The Gama Foundation, which will be funding the centre, are independent philanthropists who support a variety of university initiatives, Baker said.

“A lot of them are around research and dissemination of information to the public... I think New Zealand should be grateful for their support of a number of initiatives and this is just the latest of them.”