Four Core Risk Communication Messages
for Our Cold Dark Pandemic Winter

My friend Bruce Hennes asked me to write a brief summary of what I think the key pandemic messages should be right now, as COVID-19 vaccines start rolling out while the virus itself racks up unprecedented numbers. What I wrote didn’t meet his specs for brief, so I edited it down to this half-length version. (The original version is also available.)

Message 1: It’s an awful time for almost everybody.

Never underestimate the value of showing people you understand how miserable they are. Like most negative emotions, misery is more bearable when it’s validated.

It’s tempting to sound upbeat, but official over-optimistic perkiness just leaves people feeling alone in their misery.

Some details:

• You might want to deflect the claim a little so you won’t come across as accusing people of being miserable: “A lot of people are miserable in this pandemic,” for example, or “2020 has been a miserable time for so many of us.”
• Mention a bunch of ways people are miserable. It’ll help a bit if readers see a few items on the list that don’t apply to them, as well as a few that do.
• To share the misery, talk a little (but not too much) about the ways you’re miserable too. Then segue to empathy for people whose situations are worse than yours. And invite your audience to offer help to people whose situations are worse than theirs.
• Include everyone. It’s a miserable time too for people who think we’re overreacting to the pandemic – who feel pressured to take precautions they consider foolish and despised by the powers that be and by many of their neighbors.

Message 2: Things are going to get better, but not right away. They will get worse first.

The vaccine news is incredibly good, and you should say so. Vaccines are coming on line much sooner and turning out much more effective than we dared hope. By this time next year life will be a lot closer to normal.

But even though we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, we are still in the tunnel. No message is more important than that.

So there are two sets of details here: how to talk about the vaccines to come, and how to talk about the dark months to come first.

Talking about the vaccines:

• Temper vaccine expectations. Stress that there will be a wait before enough doses are available, then a wait before the vaccines take effect, then a wait before we all start regaining confidence, then a wait before our economy recovers, then a wait before the new normal feels normal.
• Pay attention to COVID-19 vaccine side effects. They’re minor in the vast majority of cases, but they can feel pretty major, especially if people haven’t been forewarned. It’s also crucial to warn that coincidences happen, that some people will inevitably die or get very sick shortly after being vaccinated.
• Warn also about humongous logistical glitches – not just in vaccine distribution, but potentially also in vaccine manufacturing. This sort of anticipatory guidance is crucial so people don’t overreact when the vaccine rollout hits bumps in the road.
• Remind people of all the vaccine unknowns – especially the two biggies: how long immunity lasts; and to what extent vaccinated people can still get asymptomatic infections and transmit the virus. How long even vaccinated people will have to take the familiar precautions will depend on the answers to these two questions.
• Predict controversy over who gets vaccinated when – who’s allowed to skip to the front of the line, who’s allowed to linger at the back, and especially how we prioritize the groups in the middle.
• Express and urge respect for people with a different vaccine attitude than your own. Let’s try not to politicize and polarize vaccine acceptance the way we have masks and social distancing and lockdowns and school reopenings and damn near every other key to managing this pandemic.
• Try to convince people that it’s not a good idea to berate friends and family who hesitate to get vaccinated. Most of the holdouts will find it easier to change their minds if the rest of us respect their preference to hang back for a while and see how things go.
• None of the above should take precedence over the wonderfulness of the wonderful news. To avoid sounding like an over-optimistic less-than-candid cheerleader, put the wonderfulness in the subordinate clause: “Even though these vaccines are a miraculous Christmas gift….”

Talking about the dark months:

• Keep saying that masks, social distancing, and the rest are still important. Say it sadly. These pandemic mitigation “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) are crucial because COVID-19 is spreading exponentially in much of the country, threatening our hospitals, our economies, our lifestyles, and our lives.
• And keep saying that these NPIs will remain crucial for some months to come. Even if vaccination makes NPIs no longer necessary, it will be some months before enough people are vaccinated to make a difference. Moreover, the vaccines will help sooner if we all stop making things worse while the vaccine rollout is trying to make things better.
• Explicitly connect NPIs to the vaccine solution that’s on its way. Point out that nobody wants to die in a war’s final battle, when peace is in sight. Don’t urge people to be careful “even though” vaccines are on the way. Urge people to be especially careful because vaccines are on the way.
• Even so, acknowledge that some people have the opposite reaction. The imminence of a vaccine solution tempts some people to take more risks. Try to be rueful about this, not nasty or supercilious. People will find it easier to resist the temptation if the temptation is mentioned, normalized, and oh-so-gently laughed at.

Message 3: We’re all the victims here. And we’re all the perpetrators. We need a truce.

U.S. pandemic response has been politicized and polarized beyond anyone’s expectations. The left claims President Trump and his Republican followers politicized the pandemic – by opposing masks and social distancing; holding super-spreader rallies and other events; claiming partisan credit for everything that went right, from ventilators to vaccines; blaming Democratic governors for everything that went wrong; etc. The right claims Democrats politicized the pandemic – by attacking conservative rallies as unconscionably dangerous while condoning anti-racism demonstrations; expressing skepticism about the safety of vaccines developed under Trump administration aegis; pretending they didn’t get the pandemic just as wrong as Trump in the early days when they were criticizing travel bans as xenophobic and urging everyone to go celebrate the Chinese New Year; etc.

Both sets of claims are correct. It would help to say so, and propose a truce. Even a unilateral truce will help: Stop blaming “them” even if they’re still blaming you.

It’s not just about politics. A key element of the truce is messaging that encourages citizens to stop blaming their neighbors:

• Normalize pandemic fatigue. We are all sick to death of taking precautions. We’re all cutting more corners than we used to, and more corners than we admit even to ourselves. Put pandemic fatigue on the table, especially if you’re an official whose pandemic policies are fatiguing people.
• Normalize pandemic uncertainty. We have all listened while experts serve up pandemic information inconsistent with what other experts are saying. We’re all desperately guessing what’s more dangerous than what. Even the experts are full of uncertainties. Inevitably we’re getting a lot of things wrong.
• Normalize pandemic hostility. We’re all on edge. Some of us are blowing up at what feels like other people’s insufficient precautions. Some of us are blowing up at what feels like other people’s intrusive insistence that we’re not being careful enough. Nearly all of us are blowing up at minor irritations we used to take in stride.
• Encourage people to cut some slack for each other … and for themselves. Hard times can drive people apart, or they can pull people together. We will have a better chance of pulling together if we forgive others and ourselves for the moments when they and we give in to the pressures that are driving us apart.
• It also helps to point to the ways we are pulling together already. Bandwagoning works far, far better than finger-wagging. People want to do what their friends and neighbors are doing. So we should focus approvingly on the majority who are wearing masks and planning to get vaccinated, rather than ranting about the minority who aren’t.
• Resist the temptation to carp. It’s tempting to wonder aloud at how awful U.S. pandemic response has been, and then to cast blame. But the next few horrible months demand a truce. Acknowledge the failures, in others and in yourself. Try to forgive the failures, and focus more on the successes. And urge everybody else to do likewise.

Message Four: We are all in charge of ourselves.

Let me underline (and yes, overstate) an important truth: Trust in experts and trust in officials have taken a severe hit in this pandemic. The hit is largely justified. Experts and officials have been consistently overconfident as they oscillated wildly between underreacting and overreacting to the COVID-19 threat. They’ve never lived through a severe pandemic before either, and they’re doing their best, just like the rest of us.

The bottom line is that many people are now relying more on their own common sense than on what experts and officials are telling them to do. And this is likely to become even truer in the next few months. That’s what I mean when I say we are all in charge of ourselves.

So pandemic messaging needs to appeal more to common sense. It’s still important to tell people what experts recommend and what officials demand. But it’s just as important to connect those recommendations and demands to your audience’s common sense. If what you’re urging people to do is sensible, explain why. If there are ways it’s likely to seem not so sensible to them, acknowledge that and explain why you think it’s more sensible than it seems. Ground your messaging in the reality that expert authority and official authority understandably don’t feel all that authoritative anymore to much of your audience.

In fact, it’s time I stopped calling people “audience.” Better to think of them as decision-makers, and of ourselves as consultants, gently trying to guide their commonsense decisions.

Details:

• Introduce the concept of a risk budget. We each get to decide how much risk we’re willing to take and willing to impose on others. Then we get to allocate the risk, based largely on our own seat-of-the-pants common sense. If we really, really want to get a professional haircut, maybe we should decide not to go out to dinner for a month.
• Use the risk budget concept as yet another reason to cut slack for other people. Okay, she’s taking a risk you wouldn’t take, but she may be avoiding risks you do take. The more of us who decide to make thought-through risk budgeting decisions, the better. And the more we can picture that that’s what others are doing, the likelier we are to be civil even when we feel endangered.
• Talk about harm reduction as the commonsense replacement for the futile pursuit of zero risk. The fatal flaw of pursuing zero risk is the despairing “screw it” response when we can’t measure up. We all need “permission” to have less strict standards, and “permission” to violate even those standards from time to time. Otherwise learned helplessness and fatalism may set in, and we stop trying.
• Build an individualistic case for pandemic precautions. In strongly authoritarian countries, people obey draconian pandemic regulations. In strongly communitarian countries, people feel responsible even for strangers’ welfare. But fierce individualism is central to U.S. national identity. So we need to frame more messaging in terms of helping people decide what is best for themselves and their loved ones.
• It’s important to try to make the rules reasonable (especially if you’re the one making the rules) – and important to explain the reasons. Ideally you want people not just to obey the rules, but also to take onboard the reasoning behind the rules, so they can figure out their own commonsense “rules” for themselves, grounded in the same reasoning.
• But it’s just as important to acknowledge that sometimes a rule might be wise even if it’s more than a little arbitrary, even if there’s not much science or even reasoning to back it. Try to stop pretending that you’re “following the science” when you’re actually making pretty arbitrary, debatable judgment calls. People dislike the arbitrariness, sure, but I suspect they object even more to the pretense of sound science.

Copyright © 2020 by Peter M. Sandman

For more on infectious diseases risk communication: