The biggest lesson this physician learned from COVID

hello everyone it's Eric from strong medicine and today marks the third anniversary of my first video about the novel coronavirus 2019 now known as covid I haven't talked about covet at all on the channel for a while but the three year mark of the pandemic is it seems to be a significant Milestone to Warrant revisiting the disease and today I specifically want to discuss the lessons I have learned from kovid any discussion of kovid brings up a ton of emotions I just ask that before you start leaving comments or instinctively upload or download the video watch and listen maybe my take on covet is predictable at this point but maybe I'll surprise you with what I'm going to say over the last few years I've seen plenty of folks talking about the lessons of covid I'm hardly the first however in my opinion many of these lessons Mr Mark for example some commenters say things like public health is underfunded well yeah I mean we we already knew that maybe coven made it more apparent to the public but it was hardly secret knowledge of the elite beforehand other commenters less charitably have used the opportunity opportunity to say things like covet showed us that people are selfish or awful I understand where that where that sentiment comes from I I really do but it's inflammatory it's not helpful and I don't think it's even accurate yes there have been a small handful of true grifters who have knowingly lied and who continue to lie about covid for monetary gain yet I think most people are inherently good and actions that may outwardly appear selfish usually don't originate from a place of selfishness it's totally fine if you if you disagree with that you know people can certainly have different opinions on this but for me no I I don't think people are selfish is a lesson that I should have learned from covet or that I did learn from coven so what happened the lessons I will focus on two which happened to intersect first scientists are terrible at science communication during the pandemic Physicians and scientists mistakenly believed that if they only presented the facts as they understood them the public would just accept them this is how science was communicated throughout the 20th century often in the form of books some technical like fireman lectures on physics but often layperson friendly like Silent Spring and A Brief History of Time occasionally a scientist might develop an on-camera presence like Carl Sagan in his beloved mini-series Cosmos but whether flyman or Sagan the public trusted these people you know the public did not question the motives of scientists or try to correct them I'm not suggesting this is necessarily the optimal state or that scientists can't or shouldn't be questioned or scrutinized I'm merely stating that this is how things were in the 20th century where uh when science communication was relatively simple now however we are in a completely different era of how individuals learn how they get information and how they engage with others we have social media allowing misinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish Google is empowering individuals to believe that 10 minutes on the internet can put us on par with a topic expert and without you know without naming anyone in particular politicians and pundits have leveraged the growing Association of political party with a belief in or distrust of Science in order to increase their own support with the side effect of changing the Public's perception of science something which is inherently apolitical and that's not a dig only at Republicans and conservative pundits because Democrats and liberal pundits have done this too just in the opposite direction on each issue science Communication in this environment is completely different than it was decades ago before science communication was seen as informal and lighthearted outlet for particularly well-spoken scientists to drum up interest in their area of study however today it's no longer sufficient to discuss the application of scientific reasoning to objective observations from a position of authority you know the public expects and needs more than that when crafting their message the communicator needs to consider not only the audience's scientific literacy but also their audience's biases and to be aware of their own biases too communicators need to consider the context in which the message is being delivered how might the message be challenged by online information including online pseudoscience communicators need to anticipate objections both reasonable and the Absurd to defend their assertions and conclusions in real time in short science communication needs to be considered a separate scientific discipline of its own with a body of research and with standards for the development of expertise in science communication during the pandemic there have been plenty of folks who have not understood this whether or not you agreed with everything that Anthony fauci Rochelle wolinski and Ashish jaw had to say about kovid there is no denying that they completely botched the messaging they botched it so badly with such significant consequences that entire careers could be developed around studying their failure of messaging particularly on vaccines public-facing government scientists they did not sufficiently anticipate how anti-vaxxers would capitalize on pre-existing anti-government sentiment and anti-science sentiments among conservatives they didn't consider human psychology When developing their messaging they discounted reasonable concerns from vaccine Skeptics and they downplayed uncertainties they didn't anticipate how easily social media allows pseudoscience to spread and something which they continue to fail to acknowledge even now is how the government's vigorous Embrace of vaccinations and Therapeutics sometimes outpace the data and ultimately backfired by sabotaging Confidence from the same people they most needed to convince The prominent vaccine skeptical voices including the academic coveted contrarians to at least initially were far more influential than true anti-vaxxers sometimes when this failure of communication is discussed some people get a little defensive they'll refer to prominent scientists and Physicians they follow on social media who explain things really clearly but that's missing the whole point explaining things really clearly is not sufficient for a topic as loaded and controversial today as covid other people take the defensiveness to the next level and they blame it on the audience you know saying the audience was just too brainwashed or too stupid to understand but that is total nonsense you know if you are tasked by your government or institution to convince the public to be vaccinated and after months of interviews and statements and social media posts people are even less willing to be vaccinated than before you started that is on you yet at the same time there is plenty of blame to go around this is not just about a couple people at the top this communication failure was systemic you know to be clear I'm also not saying that the CDC and the FDA have been universally right throughout the last three years because let's face it they haven't if you've watched all my previous coveted videos you will know that I've expressed skepticism about some treatments and mitigation strategies along the way but there were things that were clearly important to have convinced the public about like the initial vaccine series over which there was a truly epic messaging failure to show a different perspective on on communication failure and different types of failure let me talk about the prominent coveted contrarians I alluded to a minute ago and you know I'm not talking about all of them there's obviously there's a big range I'm talking about the academic ones the the thoughtful folks who come to this discussion from a place of science irrespective of whether or not you personally agree with them so people like vinyl Prasad J paracharya John ionitis uh Marty mockery and the like right from the outset of the pandemic these Physicians and scientists were already expressing some alternative viewpoints but they missed an early window of opportunity to foster a productive debate among people with different opinions but with similar expertise ever since then the contrains have also struggled with their messaging but for completely different reasons in short instead of instead of targeting the Right audience with the wrong message like the CDC has been doing they have been targeting the wrong audience that is they've been targeting the audience at least in need of their message conservatives one of the first influential public statements by scientists during the pandemic was an op-ed in the conservative leaning Wall Street Journal co-authored by bhattacharya in which it was argued that the infection infection fatality rate of covid was dramatically overestimated and ever since then they have continued to speak to conservative leaning media reached out to Republican politicians and fostered a strongly conservative and anti-so anti-science social media fan base this is the complete opposite of who they should have been talking to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis he doesn't need to be convinced that masks are less effective than the CDC claims he already believes that the viewers of Fox News already believe that covet was no longer a public health emergency before Marty macri came on to talk uh to talk to them about it seriously what are these guys doing preaching to the choir what they are doing is they are solidifying their own fan base they're increasing their social media Clouts they're keeping their dopamine receptors highly active and in some cases they're making a lot of money through lucrative sub-stack subscriptions I don't mean to uh sound like I'm harshly judging them no there's nothing wrong with taking personal pride in being interviewed on television or making some supplemental income but at the same time the contrarians need to understand that many others see this as an enormous conflict of interest it creates the perception from the other side that their message is not only biased but is so biased that it's not worthy of consideration so now three years into this when the contrarians do raise questions and points that are worthy of discussion which does happen one side isn't interested of course like everything coveted related it is more complicated than this for example uh bhattacharya he's claimed that he's uh he's been de-platformed from Twitter uh which would deny him the opportunity to fairly Engage The Other Side he's also very publicly complained about not being asked to speak on covid at academic ground rounds including at our mutual institution of Stanford but you know those things only happened after he had already moved rightward um with Prasad you know I've heard him praise open dialogue and the concept of the marketplace of ideas and he has repeatedly decried censorship of alternative viewpoints on social media which you know I can respect that that Viewpoint you know even if I support more limitations than he does like I respect what he says like about that I mean I think he's got a good point but if you look at his own Twitter feed and in particular comments on his own YouTube channel there is no healthy debate going on there what you find instead is an endless stream of unsupported anti-vaxx and anti-government nonsense that as far as I can tell he never once corrects even when I am sure that he disagrees with them if a commenter were to respectfully push back against prasad's ideas on those platforms they would be castigated into Oblivion by his Legions of fans you know so if an eye you need to correct misinformation posted by your own followers and subscribers despite it alienating some of them even if the content of your videos is accurate and thoughtful you have a responsibility to ensure that your own comment section is not itself a platform for conspiracies and pseudoscience which negates the good you are trying to do ultimately the communication failures of the contrarians might look completely different and might have a completely different pathogenesis as compared to those of the medical establishment but failures on both sides couldn't have been mitigated with a better understanding of science communication you need the right message delivered to the Right audience at the right time this brings me to the second lesson I learned from kovid we are all prone to bias in the case of kobit the most prominent bias a form of bias has been confirmation bias when a new study comes out about the vaccine or masks or current covid death certificates or whatever statistics or whatever the greatest predictor of how a person will interpret that information is what they already believe about it this is as true for Physicians reading the primary literature as it is for laypersons watching a television news story during the pandemic there have been papers published in which different Physicians and different scientists reach literal opposite conclusions as to what the takeaway message should be there have been plenty of times in which someone has comically exaggerated a benefit of questionable clinical relevance seen in a trial or is downplayed very real shortcomings in a trials methodology that happened uh very early on with hydroxychloroquine and later with Ivermectin and it happened with him desevere and masks and the vaccine boosters to be fair when I say everyone is biased uh biased that doesn't mean that everyone is equally biased for example Anthony fauci is not equally biased as Robert Malone it also doesn't mean that the bias in one person is equally prominent in all situations and at all times for example a person could have modest bias when talking about vaccines and dramatic bias when talking about masks as a viewer of this video you could reasonably ask here wasn't the fact that we are all biased you know sort of known before covid yes of course it was known before kobit but our biases became much more prominent when the stakes were high and when so many of us including scientists seemed to live or die by our social media clout and our online reputation scientists and Physicians have tried really hard to believe it wasn't true that bias is not a problem that we the purveyors of objective truth suffer from yet throughout covid I've seen otherwise completely reasonable people and excellent Physicians make unreasonable and unsupported statements about the effectiveness or lack thereof of a variety of covid related interventions interestingly interestingly in the majority of cases Prasad being one of the more notable exceptions the bias is in the direction of certainty asserting something as truth when in reality there's not enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion why is this happening well uncertainty makes people uncomfortable and because the public doesn't like uncertainty among those scientists and Physicians who are public figures and active on social media those who make the most certain sounding claims usually gain more followers more clout and more visibility thus contributing to the illusion that many of these questions about covid are more settled than they actually are which in turn becomes yet one more form of science communication failure and under emphasis on uncertainty before closing out there is one last thing I want to address and that's when I say everyone is biased I am most definitely including myself you know I try to mitigate my biases in part by thinking about how I reach conclusions and considering where my biases might come from I tried to actively seek out a diversity of opinions on issues for example when I had been on Twitter I deliberately followed some accounts with which I often disagreed because they sometimes made good points that I otherwise would have missed and even when I disagree with their points it was important to learn what their beliefs were and how they got there how they they how they generate those beliefs and it was helpful when people push back on my own claims and assertions for one I could be wrong and you know I need to be respectfully uh corrected and two even when I remained unconvinced by the other side being forced to defend a position can help you understand your belief in that position better provided that you do so thoughtfully and you don't just reflexively reject the counter arguments overall avoiding Echo Chambers and groupthink is critically important it's important in science and it's important in life more generally plus even if some degree of bias inevitably remains working to understand other perspectives makes one a better Communicator as well and connecting this back to science communication some more the most effective communicators are the ones who demonstrate an acceptance that they have their own biases by acknowledging value and potential correctness in other viewpoints for example I might have a set of beliefs on masking as it relates to covid this set of beliefs includes the degree of benefits I believe masks have or don't have what situation that applies the differences between mask types and how objective data on masks should interface with Community Values to create public policy I have a set of beliefs about this but I accept that there is a spectrum of beliefs to either side of me on on the set of questions that reasonable people can reasonably hold it's like having a point estimate surrounded by confidence interval but as with a confidence interval it is possible that the truth lies outside what I perceive as reasonable in other words there is what I believe to be true what others might reasonably believe to be true and what is theoretically possible the best science communicators understand the existence of those boundaries how their biases might influence how they Define them and how Their audience compares to themselves so that's all I want to say today you know three years after I started talking and thinking about covid I suspect there was something in there to upset pretty much everyone but I also hope that everyone found something I said that resonated with your own experience and your and your own viewpoints and if I did say something that would respectfully question an idea or belief you currently accept as true I hope you don't see that as a bad thing we all need to be better at leaning into respectful disagreement instead of rejecting it otherwise we will continue to talk past each other on these kinds of issues and I think one thing we can all agree on is that the next Global crisis we collectively face could be much worse than covet has been anyway please leave your thoughts and comments below dissenting opinions are definitely welcome but as always comments that are overtly inflammatory or overtly disrespectful regardless of the target will be removed and I'll be back in a few days uh with some more uh conventional medical videos

Channel: Strong Medicine

Views: 4,479

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Id: 6pBj5lGJVQs

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2023