The dust is starting to settle over the carcass of the main teaching year, though it feels like I’m still whacking it with a stick because it keeps twitching. Marking is the gift that just keeps on giving. And it means we’ve reached that part of the year where I’ve got a bunch of things going on which I agreed to long enough ago that I’ve forgotten about.
One of those things is a double-header talk and “workshop” around science and media, with guest speaker John Kerr talking about our own work and research experiences in the context of science and media.
Kerr is a senior research fellow and science lead for the public health communication centre at the University of Otago, Wellington. Full disclosure, I’ve worked with him on and off since 2016.
Kerr has a lot of experience in communication as a scientist and as a person working to support scientists in their communication endeavours. In 2020, he got a job working for the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the UK, and headed there just in time for a lockdown that lasted about 18 months. What a time to start a new job: as a global pandemic kicks off.
Or, if you do science and communication work, the best of times. Kerr describes a rollercoaster ride in which he was suddenly not doing the things he was hired for because everyone he was working with had pivoted to research on how people were responding to Covid, and how best to communicate risk. And he was doing it from his bedroom.
This is psychology in action: how do people understand, interpret and respond to the risks of getting Covid, or balance the pros and cons of getting a vaccine that has been developed faster than pretty much anything we’ve ever seen?
A good case study of this is what sounds like a sleepless 24 hours for the Winton Centre working out how best to communicate the challenge associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. This vaccine was implicated early in a higher-rate-than-chance risk of a particular kind of blood clot.
How big a risk? It varied by age from 1 in 500,000 for people aged 60-69 to just over 1 in 100,000 for people aged 20-29. Consider that your chance of a Lotto win is about 1 in 380,000 … This is not an uncommon kind of comparison that people make, but the mistake here is that we want to win the lottery, and that gets in the way of helping people to understand their risks.
This isn’t a “big” risk, but it’s non-zero. For some people, that will feel like a riskier proposition than for others and risky enough to decline getting the vaccine. So, the decision was to make recommendations that older people should continue to get vaccinated but that younger Britons could take a pass.
Why? Older people were much more badly affected by Covid, and maybe slightly less likely to get a clot associated with the vaccine.
How do you communicate this risk? The Winton folk ended up with a fantastic infographic that placed these risks side-by-side, broken down by age so people could easily see the relative risks – that if you’re in your 40s, your chance of a clot was 1 in 200,000 but your 16-week risk of ICU admission with Covid-19 was about 11 times higher.
This is extremely clever because we’re not comparing the risk of a clot with something unrelated, such as lightning strikes or a Lotto win. And it presents it graphically with blobs representing people per 100,000, so our brains aren’t struggling with big numbers.
The punchline is that Kerr and his lockdown beard ended up on BBC television explaining the graphic and its rationale. Obviously, John is now back in Wellington, and probably hoping for a quieter few years.
