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Chemical spills, food scares, terrorist attacks and, of course, pandemics: How can we help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication - even when evidence is scant and uncertainty predominates? Joining David to share their experience from the frontlines are: Professor Brooke Rogers OBE - Behavioural scientist at KCL, and SAGE participant advising government on the coronavirus measures and risks to national security Professor Lord John Krebs - former head of the Food Standards Agency where he dealt with BSE in sheep, dioxins and a series of food scares. *** David Spiegelhalter: When confronted with a sudden crisis, a terrorist attack, a chemical spill, a food scare, or indeed an outbreak of a new infectious disease, good communication is crucial to an effective response. Of course we're still navigating our way through the coronavirus pandemic so we've all been on the receiving end of crisis communications quite recently, I will certainly be covering that. But we'll also be considering crisis communications more broadly, trying to pull out principles of best practice that can be applied across very different scenarios. How can governments and other organizations help manage and reduce the impact of these frightening events with good communication? David Spiegelhalter: My guests today both have extensive experience in a range of different crisis situations. Prof. Brooke Rogers, OBE, is a social psychologist whose work focuses on events like chemical, biological, and nuclear accidents or attacks. She advises the UK government on risks to national security and public health and she's currently advising them on the public response to coronavirus measures. Brooke, welcome to Risky Talk. Brooke Rogers: Thank you, David. David Spiegelhalter: Prof. Lord John Krebs originally made his name as a zoologist, but in the year 2002 he became the first chairman of the newly created Food Standards Agency, where he was on the frontline dealing with risks to food safety, including mad cow disease. Welcome, John. John Krebs: Hello, David. Good to be here. David Spiegelhalter: How great to have you both with us. Brooke, I'm going to come to you first to get a sense of the work you do. You're a member of several groups which advise the UK government on issues of national security and public health. Can you explain what kind of situations you plan for and what kind of advice you provide? Brooke Rogers: I have to frame the role that I hold across several different organizations as an independent academic role, they're not paid roles. And I am there to challenge, to question, to try to generate or provide evidence when needed, so all of the comments that I'll make today are very much in my independent academic role from Kings College, London, I not speak on behalf of government. In response to your question, we tend to work with the National Risk Register, which is the public-facing view of the risk landscape that we're considering for the UK. Brooke Rogers: And we very much look across the range of events from fluvial flooding, for example, or chemical releases, terrorist attacks. We would look at pandemic influenza and other types of pandemics, a heat wave, intense cold, drought. We look across the board and say, "Where can we place this in terms of likelihood or plausibility and impact on the public?" And try to put that into a framework that then can enable the experts advising government to provide advice for the government to make decisions about the advice that they then cascade down to the local level. David Spiegelhalter: Where does your experience as a psychologist come into this? Brooke Rogers: I would say that one of the best examples would be through the Behavioral Science experts in the Cabinet Office. And we're a motley crew of behavioral scientists and we look at the risks scenarios that are being used for each risk and threat. And we look at the language that they're using, the way in which they're framing members of the public, the assumptions that they're making about public behavior and we bring evidence to bear on those conversations. Sometimes we challenge the language and we, I would say, have seen quite a change in the way in which they're understanding public reactions. And we've also challenged the measures that they're using and have provided evidence and sent papers up to the government chief scientific advisor and made a case for changing the measurements they were using to understand the impact on the public. David Spiegelhalter: Oh, that is so much for covering there. But let's look at actual SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. I was on it back in the days of volcanic ash for heaven sakes, and of course now it's got a lot of work to do, never had such prominence. What's your role? Brooke Rogers: SAGE is not really a membership group, I would say that we're participants and that is underpinned by several other groups. We have SPI-B which is more of the behavioral science approach, we have SPI-M which is our modeling group and we have NERVTAG, which is looking more at the epidemiology and so on. And we bring those lenses together and each group also has many subgroups that work underneath it so there's a layering effect, we can target the questions that we're being asked to consider. Brooke Rogers: And quite often those questions can be broad. We've been working with them to make them a little bit more focused as we move along and in many cases we will suggest where we'll look for the evidence if it exists. Sometimes it won't be directly around pandemic response, we'll have to look at other types of infectious disease and say, "It looks like this will happen." And other times we're very much suggesting principles that should be applied for this communication for understanding behavior moving forward. David Spiegelhalter: Okay. I think it's worth just emphasizing from what you said that the job of SAGE is not to tell the government what to do, it's to provide evidence and projections to help them make decisions. Okay, John, you had an exciting time when you're at the Food Standards Agency, what kinds of things did you have to respond to in your communications? John Krebs: Well, David, I'd divide them into three categories. There are risks that were identified where we knew there was a risk, probably very small and something where you've got to tell people that could be a risk but we're not asking you to do anything different. And a classic example of that was acrylamide. So in about 2001, 2002, some Swedish scientists discovered that if you cook certain kinds of food, particularly starch-containing foods at a high temperature, like making chips or French fries, then you create this chemical called acrylamide which can be carcinogenic. So when you discover that do you say to people, "Stop eating chips?" Do you say to people, "Cook your chips to low temperature so they're not nice and crisp and possibly burn yourself on the fat while you're measuring the temperature?" Or do you say, "This is not a new risk, we think it's very small. Be aware of it but carry on doing what you were doing before." John Krebs: The second kind of risk is one which is a public perception of risk but doesn't actually exist scientifically. And the case where I found that most difficult was GMOs. In the late '90s and early noughties, there was a huge campaign by the green groups against GMOs and many people became fearful that GMOs were bad for their health. And I discovered it's not enough to say the science says that the GMOs that you may be exposed to are completely safe because it's an emotional issue not a scientific issue. And then the third kind of situation was we simply don't know. John Krebs: And the classic example for me was BSE in sheep. We knew that mad cow disease was in cattle but we didn't know whether or not mad cow disease had also infected sheep. And the government of the time was very nervous about us even mentioning that. But I took the view, it's better to treat people as adults and say, "Look, there could be this risk." And we thought a lot about how we'd express this idea of there might be a risk but we don't know, and then what we did there was to say, "There could be a risk, we simply don't know at the moment. We're not advising you to stop eating lamb, but if you want to that's up to you, but we are on the case and we're doing research to find out the answer and we will get back to you very soon." John Krebs: That in a way he was trying to treat the population as an adult group who would understand risk and uncertainty. That in itself was a risky approach but I think it worked. The best answer is, "We simply don't know but we're onto the case." Sometimes you've got to recognize that people's perception of risk diverges from the pure science, GMOs, and sometimes you're communicating, "There could be a risk. It's small but we don't necessarily want you to do anything different about it." David Spiegelhalter: Wow. John, you covered a lot of stuff there and we'll come back to some of it- John Krebs: I'm sorry I- David Spiegelhalter: No, no, that's fine. The acrylamide as well... I think you know way after you left I think the Food Standards Agency had a rather ill-judged campaign- John Krebs: Toast-gate, I think it's called- David Spiegelhalter: Yeah, yeah, the killer toast, which was really, I think taking the wrong approach- John Krebs: Absolutely. David Spiegelhalter: ... To dealing with these risks. Okay, so one of the things we ask everybody in our podcast is to step back a bit. Why are you doing this in the first place? What is your actual aims in doing this? What's it trying to achieve? And I think in the Winton Center we go on about, we're trying to inform rather than persuade. And I'm interested with both of you of where in that spectrum you operate. Brooke, what are you trying to do in your work? Brooke Rogers: I would say that my career, my life has really been about enhancing opportunities for informed decision-making. And it was really as quite a young academic when I started attending... I attended something called a sand pit, and I was still a postdoc and I had the chance to meet practitioners, government practitioners I would have never met before, I hadn't the confidence to meet before. And they locked us in a hotel with people from different disciplines. And we learned about how the challenges that these organizations had and the way in which they were thinking about them. Brooke Rogers: And I felt that quite often the solutions were being drawn primarily from the physical sciences with very little thought about how publics or how people who use those tools would think about them or respond to them. And I also felt that when the public we're considered that Hollywood-esque assumptions were being made about their behavior, their appetite for risk, their perceptions of risk. And so I thought, how can we generate evidence from between members of the public, which is where we started with our work, practitioners more on the frontline and the policy makers. It's just trying to bring more reality to those plans and policies that are being made and the hope that they will trickle down into practice and into the way in which we engage with members of the public and let them engage with our processes as well. David Spiegelhalter: John, Brooke mentioned very strongly that she was interested in informing people so they could make better decisions. How does that fit in with your work at the FSA? John Krebs: Well, the FSA, our watch word was we put the interests of the consumer first. And supposing a problem crops up with food, you've got a range of actions you could take. You could ban it, get it removed from the supermarket shelves, you could give people warning, say, "This is there but it's potentially dangerous." Or you could try to inform people as Brooke was talking about and enable them to make informed choices. I think my objective in communicating risk and uncertainty where we weren't banning, we weren't advising people not to eat something, was to say, "Here is the information we've got, use it in your own way. This is our advice." Our advice might be, "Carry on as normal or if you're worried about it shift to eating something slightly different." John Krebs: But really, I agree with Brooke when she said what's key in this is transparency. Because I think transparency, complete honesty is one of the pathways to building trust, because in the end it's all about do people trust you? Do they think this guy's a shyster? He's just pulling the wool over our eyes or is he somebody who tells it straight? And telling it straight over and over again is one of the ways to help to build that trust. David Spiegelhalter: What about in the virus particularly the period we've gone through, or even going through now where actually there is quite a lot of guidance, instructions, and even laws that are there, to measures to control people's behavior in extent. Brooke, how do you feel the responsibility that you need to provide the evidence to back up those instructions? Brooke Rogers: Certainly. And it's been interesting from the SAGE point of view because the way in which they operated in the past it's always been very rapid. Let's say for Ebola, I think they only had four meetings and so by the time the response was over the information was released but there wasn't a huge public appetite for it and this was part of a much, much larger government communication system. And I would say that all of us are very, very keen on transparency. And it was a bit of a shock but when we saw how long this engagement would carry on for all of us transparency is key, and I believe very strongly that Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty have been advocating for that. Brooke Rogers: It took a little bit of time behind the scenes to change that structure to enable it but our desire is to have it as real time release of information as close to real time as we can and that redaction would be the exception, if it ever needed to happen it should be because of security implications. I think that science should be a conversation between scientists but also I'm so desperate, I love opening science up to the public. I go into schools and things like that so it should be a conversation with the public as well. Brooke Rogers: And when decisions are made, and we, we do not make the decisions the decisions are political, they have to balance quite a few things so we are one piece of information going in. I do think for any decision across the board it's important to recognize the information that you're drawing upon and to give the rationale for the direction that you're moving in. Because as the science brings in new information we need to be able to consider that for any event and to adapt our response in light of new evidence. So you can have that conversation and say, "We suggested this. We were going with this, new information has come in and therefore we are now changing our advice and these are the implications for you in your daily life." David Spiegelhalter: Okay. If you are telling people to do things for transparency you do need to provide a reason for that and not just an authoritarian diktat. John, have in your work, were you in a situation where you were really telling people, you wanted to tell people to do thi…
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