Chris Murphy and Saad Omer Monday at Yale med school roundtable.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy is looking for Congress to allocate $45 million toward public health communication efforts — funding that local pandemic experts said is sorely needed to fight a web of anti-vax and anti-mask conspiracy theories.
That was the upshot of a roundtable conversation with researchers and policymakers held on Monday morning at the Yale School of Medicine.
Murphy shared news of the Promoting Public Health Information Act, which he proposed last week along with New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján. The act would establish a Public Health Information and Communications Advisory Committee within the federal Department of Health and Human Services, as well as other outreach and education efforts on public health.
He heard back some of the challenges that local health departments and medical institutions are facing as they work to win the public’s trust.
The pandemic revealed that “an incredible array of players are interested in spreading misinformation,” Murphy said. A strong health communications apparatus is necessary not only for managing Covid-19, but for future public health crises, he argued. “Whatever the next public health emergency is, it’s gonna happen again.”
Saad Omer, a vaccine researcher and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, noted that worldwide, health professionals such as nurses and doctors are the most trusted source of medical information. Future campaigns could leverage existing relationships between medical providers and their patients, he suggested.
Meanwhile, trust in national bodies like the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health has wavered, Omer said.
Manisha Juthani: Be up front about the unknown.
State Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani stressed the importance of being honest about uncertainty in health communications, particularly when science around public health interventions continues to develop and change.
“It’s important to recognize what we know and what we don’t know,” she said. “The more people have trust in public officials, the more they will be a little forgiving if we have to change because the science changes.”
The roundtable speakers agreed that shifting messages and scientific uncertainty make combating the confident messages of conspiracy theorists all the more difficult. “We have to be much more sensitive to the risks the public is going to take during a time of emergency,” Murphy said.
New Haven’s Health Director Maritza Bond shared her strategy of working with trusted community members, such as religious figures, in order to convey public health messages.
“We made an effort to communicate the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Bond said. She shared a mantra of “transparency, transparency, transparency, no matter how hard the information is.”
Still, communication adjustments may not be enough on their own to combat misinformation.
Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, noted that as part of preparation for the next pandemic, research on issues like mask effectiveness should be fully funded so that communications from health officials can be clear and unwavering from the outset.
And earning trust in official public health messaging may require repairing healthcare institutions that have often failed Black, Native, Latino, immigrant, and queer patients.
“We can’t disaggregate misinformation from the lack of trust in healthcare institutions,” Murphy said.