 Fy Llywodraeth yma, ac yn ffordd i'n ffifffadau mewn ydyn nhw ym 19 oes ym 19 oed yn 2022. The morning we will take evidence on the Covid 19 communication of public health information inquiry. We have two panels today, and I'd like to welcome our first panel to the meeting, who are appearing virtually. Callum Hood, head of research for the Centre of Countering Digital Hate. Will Moy, chief executive of full fact, Dr Dawn Holford, senior research associate for cyber and Tracy Brown, OBE director of sense and science. Thank you very much for giving us your time this morning. The session will be the first of the committee's evidence sessions on the inquiry. There will be a further session on 23 June before we hear from the Minister for Public Health, Women's Health and Sport on 30 June. Each member will have approximately 10 minutes to speak to the panel and ask their questions. If you would like to respond to an issue being discussed, please put R in the chat box and we'll try and bring you in. Can I invite the witnesses just to introduce yourself? Can we start with Callum, please? Good morning. It's great to be here. I invite to speak to you today. I'm Callum Hoot. I'm the head of research at the Centre for Digital Hate. The CCH is a U.S. non-profit 501C3 based in Washington, D.C. and the CCHUK is a non-profit based in the UK as well. So we're an international organisation that looks at countering hate and disinformation by disrupting the online architecture that enables its growth and we've done a lot of work on COVID and anti-vax during the pandemic. Thank you very much Callum. Can I bring in Will? Thank you. My name is Will. I run a charity called Full Fact. As we all know, bad information can ruin lives, can damage people's health, can promote hate and it can hurt democracy. Full Fact tries to understand how bad information comes from, provides fact-checking for millions of people to make up their own minds about key topics and tries to understand how we can make systems changes to reduce the harm done by bad information. Thank you, Will. Can I bring in Dr Dawn? Hi. My name is Dawn Holfridt and I am a coordinating leader of SIBE, which is an independent initiative led by academic researchers. In the past two years, SIBE has been actively looking at the landscape of science and public health communication and the challenges that it's faced during the pandemic and just how can we better link up scientific community by better evidence for policymaking. That's great. Thanks very much. Tracy. Hi. I'm the director of Sense About Science. We are a charity that promotes public interest in sound science and evidence. We work with communities all over the UK to make sense of science and with researchers and policymakers to create an environment in which researchers discussed openly and with appreciation of uncertainty and 20 years of experience of helping people navigate some of the most complex and controversial areas of evidence in policymaking. Thank you very much. I'll now turn to questions. If I may begin by asking the first question. Firstly, can I ask the panel to define misinformation and disinformation? Can the panel give examples of misinformation and disinformation that's spread during the pandemic? Tracy, can I bring you through? Because I know that in your report you do highlight this. Thank you. Our report you referred to is a scoping inquiry into how well the government's evidence of COVID-19 decisions serve society. Misinformation is something that people, I think actually will probably better at defining this, but misinformation is something that people attain through trying to make sense of the world and disinformation is an active attempt to give people wrong information. I would actually draw attention to lack of information. In many cases I find it rather strange that the focus in a way has been looking at some of the more fringe discussions that there have been around things like vaccination and so on when people were actually knocking at the door of the UK government and also the devolved administration governments try and get more information and I don't think they were very well served in a lot of cases around the areas of risk and understanding of the magnitude of effect of different interventions. There's a kind of other category if you like which is just a vacuum of information into which other things get sucked and that tends to draw in both misinformation and disinformation. Thank you very much. Will, can I bring you in? The standard distinction between misinformation and disinformation and misinformation is consumer spread inadvertently and disinformation is in some way deliberate. It's important to say that the same piece of content could be both misinformation and disinformation. You could have false information deliberately ceded into public debate but then shared by people who are genuinely trying to help their friends and family in genuinely ceded and in that context you'd call it misinformation. So I'd suggest that Tracy's attention to information quality more widely is a really helpful thing to think about here. We talk about the unlikely journey of good information. I think at this stage in the Covid process and I should say I'm very grateful for this inquiry I think of during a very important task we're all familiar with the reverse for Swiss cheese model of risk prevention which is to say that no one set of protections eliminates all risk, every set of protections has some hold in it and so in order to avoid risk you have a whole series of layers of protections that collectively stop the holes from going all the way through the system. Good information works differently. A lot of things have to go right in sequence for people to end up being well informed. Firstly we have to collect good data then we have to do good analysis on it then we have to communicate those data analysis to people who can reach large audiences. They have to understand it, communicate it effectively and then it has to be understood and used by people making decisions in their own lives or in policy context or whatever and every stage of that process can fail. Let's talk about misinformation just about as for content at the end of that long process then sometimes it's pure of the root causes of how misinformation and disinformation comes to harm to people's health. Thank you very much, that's very helpful. Can I just ask, during the height of the pandemic, would Covid was dominating the news and all government business? Do you think that there was a case of information overload where people either could not keep up or did not want to keep up and if that's the case do you think sometimes that too much information can be unhelpful? I'm open to whoever wants to take that question. I hope you just want to raise your hand. Tracy? It's actually the kind of information that people wanted. What we found was that there was an underestimation of the extent to which policies required people to make trade-offs in their lives against other risks and benefits that they needed to think about. Give you an example, one of the people we spoke to was a bus driver of rural services who had to make the decision about whether to let a teenager on the bus without a mask and they needed some sense of the order of magnitude of that risk in order to determine whether it was sufficient to leave a child standing on a lonely rural road with no pavement and not pick them up. They were making quite significant decisions in their lives. They aren't just deciding about what they think sat at home. Lots of people were out deciding whether their employees were safe. They were deciding whether to have health visitor services to families in crisis and child protection services and things like this and trying to weigh those kinds of risks. In that area there was a real trouble that people had with getting at the thinking of the government decision making and trying to understand the relationship between the evidence and so on. There was a lot of going on obviously in terms of things being found out. There was a huge stream of information coming, not just from people's own governments and scientists and so on but internationally. There was a 24-7 hunger for COVID news and casting around the world and people were watching what was going on in terms of case rises in Germany or the USA, India and so on. So there was a feeling I think that people had of being overwhelmed with COVID stuff but not necessarily the enabling information they needed in making decisions in their lives. We found quite a drop off, so we had run a survey with that social research looking at what people's experience in the first six months of the pandemic and then in the early part of 2021. There was quite a drop off between the numbers of people looking for information each day but not that significant interestingly. It went from somewhere in the 90s, I think it was about 93% or something, we're looking once a week or more for information on government policies and it dropped something like 76% a year later. We expected a bigger drop off but the numbers searching every single day or more than once a day really dropped. There was a sort of fatigue apparent there but I do think that the crucial bit is that people have told us in many, many settings that they were missing the key information they needed to make good decisions. Thank you, Tracy. Wilmoi, I know that you'd like to come in. Just to build on what Tracy said, I completely agree with that analysis firstly there was a huge appetite for reliable trustworthy information full fact saw more people coming to our work than ever before. We also saw the first increase in use of traditional media like TV that we've seen year on year for a very long time. At the same time people were failing to get information directly useful to them and I can give you two examples of that. One is that early on in the pandemic we launched a service called Ask Full Fact where we asked people for what question you have. We've got over 2,000 questions in a few weeks and 40% of them were about what does the guidance mean, how does it apply to me, what can I actually do, what do I do in this situation and some of them were genuinely heartbreaking practical questions. I have someone I care for who's on the other side of the border am I allowed to go there and help them get their medicine or not. They're really practical life changing situations. That kind of demand was there. The other side where I think there was a real unmet demand for good information was in certain particular groups and situations and one was around people who were pregnant, women who were pregnant or tried to get pregnant, who were subject to constantly changing guidance and science which became very confusing. So we ended up actually working with a charity called Pregnant then Screwed which advocates the rights of people who are pregnant and against discrimination and set up a WhatsApp helpline where people could test their questions for us and the appetite for that again was huge just because although there have been lots of guidance and so much information out there, it hadn't actually spoken to people in a consistent way in that situation who were starting families and particularly women who were actually pregnant and trying to make choices about, for example, getting the vaccine when they're pregnant or when they're breastfeeding or when they're trying to get pregnant. Thank you very much. I remember that in the hesitancy from the ladies who were pregnant and trying to get pregnant during that time with the vaccinations. Can I move on to Murdo? Thank you, thank you. Good morning. Good morning panel. I think all the parliamentarians here will have had experience over the past two years of constituents writing in, expressing views, saying, you know, Covid is a hoax. It's all a conspiracy by the government. Vaccinations are there to try and control the population and usually linking to, you know, articles in obscure corners of the internet backing up their argument. I mean, maybe I could ask this first to Dr Don Hallford because it's covered a bit in the paper you submitted. What is the motivation for those who are actively spreading disinformation on the internet that people are picking up on? So, I think this is probably also related to Callum because we cite his work as well. But we do see examples of people wanting to actually make a political or personal gain for presenting disinformation. This information around, for example, is saying that Covid is not so bad you can cure with turmeric or natural homeopathy. Usually are wanting people to turn to them for help as well. And also, basically, we also have evidence that there are political actors, international actors who have interest in sewing distrust in effective Western vaccines, for example. It has been shown that this ethnic pitera council is deliberately spreading this information about the side effects experience of other vaccines. We are actually facing coordinated campaigns that are aiming to mislead people. It may be a destabilisation motive here but there is a lot of different motives of the actions. Okay, thank you. I think Callum, who do you want to come in? Thanks, yeah. We can hear you. No, we can hear you now, that's okay. Okay, wonderful. So, just to pick, I don't mention this, but when it comes to disinformation there are some very influential individuals around the world whose motivation is primarily financial. They typically come from the sort of alternative health industry and they have a product, Dell, and they sell that product with what's sometimes been called sort of health or medical populism. So they tell you that you can't trust your doctor, you can't trust the NHS or whichever public health body it is in your country that you live in and that you should trust them instead and that there's an easy solution and it's to purchase some sort of supplement or to follow some sort of advice that they offer. We did a report called Pandemic Profiteers that looked at 12 such individuals and they had annual revenues of around $36 million and this is $36 million. And this is people like Joseph McColler who's an alternative health entrepreneur, runs the most popular alternative health website in the world and people like Andrew Wakefield who we know well in the UK who's turned his skepticism about vaccines into somewhat of a business in the US as well. So that's disinformation and then when it comes to misinformation it sort of relates to the previous question about information overload and so on. Are there any extraordinary people trying to make sense of all this, as all of us experience there are big information gaps that we had and there was a lot of anxiety about how dangerous is COVID, when more vaccines come, you know, how safe are they, how can I avoid getting COVID and how dangerous will it be to me. And so a lot of the misinformation spread was a result of people trying to grapple with those anxieties and uncertainties and was often informed by the disinformation, I think this is something we'll mention, informed by the disinformation spread by more organised determinants and organised individuals like those I've just described. Okay, thanks for that. My second question follows on then from what you've just said because you had that one group of people who were basically saying, you know, you don't believe it. There was another group of people who took perhaps a slightly more rational view which was that we accept COVID as a problem but we are nervous about being vaccinated because these vaccines have only just been invented. We don't know what the long-term consequences would be. The convener was mentioning earlier the issue with pregnant women being concerned about taking the vaccine. I suppose my question therefore is where the public health messages being put out across the UK sufficient to try and reassure people who were concerned about vaccinations and to what extent were those messages being undermined by misinformation on the internet and elsewhere? Who would like to pick that up? Will. Thank you. That's a big question and I'll be interested in the panel's response to it. What we can say is these numbers are from memory reportedly accurate. In September 2010 before there was a vaccine available any about 60% of people were sure that they would pick it. So there was a significant chunk of the population who were not sure. Months later, a lot of those uncertain people had chosen to have the vaccine and by now 9 out of 10 people in the UK voted with their arms and had at least one dose of the vaccine. So whatever we talk about for people who have ultimately chosen not to have a vaccine, it's important to remember that the vast majority of people have made this choice together. I think what we found is that the clearer and more consistent of the health messaging the more effective it is and it took time sometimes to get that clarity. But there were groups of people who were less well served by the general messaging and who had good rational reasons to be hesitant. I think very often it's possible to portray people who are hesitant about having a vaccine as unreasonable. It's important always to understand what are people's good reasons for being hesitant. In this case, for example, black people were less likely to get the vaccine particularly early on and there is a long history of medicines not being appropriately tested with black people and so on and there are good grounds for less trust in the medical system for black people than for white people and that played out. There are communities which are just less well connected with public health authorities and the health system which there was a real difficulty in making those gaps and huge efforts were made in terms of finding the right people in the right communities to talk to people and establish genuine dialogue and that over time paid off. But there was always a group of people who would go for it straight away and just basically needed to be told when and where. There was always a group of people who needed to be told when and where and here's a decent reason to believe this thing. And then there was a group of people who needed more dialogue and in nine out of ten cases we got there eventually if you see what I mean and ultimately four facts point of view is whether you choose to have a vaccine or not is entirely up to you it's not our job to persuade you to do anything it's our job to make sure you have the best information possible to make up your own mind but from a point of view of the vaccine rolled out specifically as opposed to other aspects in public health intervention much more than nine out of ten would be a pretty amazing result. Okay, thanks very much. Everybody else wants in so that should be quite brief. Tracy around first of all. First I think just worth noting that in drawing conclusions about how much people consumed dodgy information we did actually lock lots of people up indoors with only their social media to try and stay in contact with each other. I doubt that is that representative and I know a lot of people contacted us talking about that they just became very exhausted with all that stuff as well and they began to spot patterns in the way that people were trying to manipulate them into believing their version of events or their alternative version of events I also think it's worth noting that in the countries of the UK people largely trust state institutions for information we don't have the kinds of problems that South Africa had or the USA had where people go to their preachers for example, there was a lot of online preaching going on that was far more problematic than anything we faced in these countries. On the vaccine stuff specifically I really agree with what Will said that I actually think the 60% I was a bit shocked by I don't think any decent scientist should sign up to a vaccine that they haven't seen the statistics for and none of us should have really said yes to that one in a way but it was absolutely true that people did get vaccinated and to a really amazing degree and very quickly without a great deal of effort for most of it. The two things that I would really want to highlight I'd love to see this committee highlight first of all I thought that the MHRA really missed an opportunity there was a bit too much speaking at people not with them we could have heard so much about what were the criteria for making the judgement about the vaccine before the vaccine was assessed take people with people on that journey and make us have got a job to do there to explain how what questions they ask so that we all as a society become part of asking those questions and then when the answers come it doesn't feel as though they're then sort of backfilling the explanation of how rigorous that that questioning was that would have been a good thing and I think also we're hearing from and I haven't bottled this out myself but we're hearing from specialists or veterans of HIV in the UK that their experience of building relationships with communities was underutilised there was a very centralised approach to vaccine information and it was only in Italy that there was appreciation of just how much community trust building needs to go on particularly with the kind of communities that will make reference to some of them but HIV was a huge success in the UK in terms of Scotland particularly really good at getting people to be frank about their job use or their sexual habits those relationships were very solid and we perhaps didn't make as much use of those earlier on OK Callum, who'd please and it'll be fairly brief because we're running out of time Yes I mean I'll just say obviously people with anxieties about vaccines would often turn to social media to have those anxieties answered and unfortunately due to the prevalence of this or disinformation they would often have those anxieties or questions answered with complete falsehoods I have to say throughout the course of my research on these topics it was striking how often searching for information about the latest conspiracy theory or piece of misinformation was more likely to surface more of that misinformation than reliable answers and it was sort of gov.uk black and white pages versus you know somewhere down in the Google rankings versus all singing, all dancing marketing campaigns by the sort of professional disinformation spreaders that I've talked about previously so I think there's probably some lessons to be learned about thinking of very simple and effective ways of ensuring that people who are seeking answers on some of these anxieties get the best information presented to them in the Google search ranking or easily accessible on social media in an engaging format OK, thanks and lastly Don Holford Yes, excellent points that the others have made to introduce things one which is that public health information by ways that make it easy for people to follow them so if we go back to the vaccine rollout as an example I think in Scotland the letters were sent to people or they had to do a show up so that sort of highlighted the ease of access that you can have to getting back some this perhaps wasn't done quite so well in England where it was a booking system which would have left a lot of people who had problems with dealing with online bookings and perhaps that's when the doubts seek that's when the doubts feed in as soon as it's really so important if it's that hard to do the second thing I want to mention is about understanding this information and where it really stands from and what it's targeting because we always see that new myths are springing up but they tend to cluster under themes so we've done some research on this to see that these themes also tap into logical characteristics of the audience that's trying to reach so some are focused on stoking fear some are invoking push back against perceived restrictions specifically targeting religious beliefs so if you think of these the roots of the misinformation we have to understand why it's so compelling to people because it speaks what they're worried about and these could be various different reasons okay thank you thanks very much just a reminder to witnesses it's helpful to get examples but can I suggest that we please avoid naming individuals can I move on to Alex Rowley thank you very much can I begin with Dr Don Hullford in your submission you say there is considerable collective and diverse expertise amongst researchers that could support government in communicating science and public health messaging based on evidence informed principles but you then go on to say however there is a lack of infrastructure to help with rapid consolidation of this expertise to enable it to happen could you expand on that a bit what you mean by lack of infrastructure please what we see what Cybee has specifically seen is that distributed around the UK, around the world there are a lot of research scientists who are looking in the area of public health communications with those certain principles about making for example matching public health information with the behavioral support that will enable people to follow the instructions given we also know what's the best way to present risks in terms of say fact boxes that can help people understand and weigh up what are the trade-offs with regards to risk we haven't seen this consistently applied across a lot of different countries in their public health communications and we see that actually some of the problems are that perhaps it's really difficult to reach the scientists who have this knowledge because it's so distributed so when we talk about infrastructure we're looking at what sort of tools could what sort of incentive structures what sort of channels could we have just crowd source in a way this collective expertise and we make that point because when we do so we can also see the level of scientific consensus in how a public message could be developed how can we connect scientists who may be working on that specific question that policy makers wish to address and have them respond within the given time frame that's needed to put that message out there OK, thank you Can I ask the panel in terms of looking back over the Covid period what are the key lessons for government what should government or could government do better so what are the key lessons and secondly in terms of communication the comparison between Scotland and the rest of the UK I think in Scotland the First Minister had a press conference near enough every day and was communicating a message and generally that was certainly well received it was less so in the UK Government but the UK Government certainly their press briefs used to be much more informative people like the Dr Whitty Jonathan Vlantam never had been heard of before now household names and very informative so what could government do better, how did it perform and what are the lessons that I could start with Tracy Brown please That's a really big question I would draw attention to the fact that there was conflict within government's approach if we're talking about the relationship the information that was given out communication with people there was conflict in government's approach between what we've characterised as an authoritarian and an authoritative approach so an authoritarian approach tell people hand space space tell them they've got to go out for a walk once a day unlock indoors and hope that they'll police each other around those things not very much reasoning with people about why those things were being emphasised the authoritative approach which was favoured by Dr Whitty you can see that in the way that he presented information was of an intention with that and there's a behavioural science argument behind that that came out at Spidey which was is it better to just give people simple messages that they can police or is it better to lay out the unknowns when the gaps are what this is our best guess what it showed was that initially you can get across a very simple set of rules but of course as information changes as we learn more and the situation changes you've got to change those rules and then it becomes a complete method of outdated information hand space space for example Sage was advising the government to change that and emphasise ventilation for months before any change happened and into this day some of you may have noticed we still get wiped down on trains and things like this on wonders who's directing we had conflicts raised with us particularly in Scotland between lots of different bodies and particularly professional bodies being giving advice that was no longer in keeping with what the government was saying so there was a confusion and I think the only way through that is to take the authoritative approach and I think there's generally a feeling that that would have been a better thing to do it could also be said that if you take the authoritarian approach and you just emphasise rules then when people see the breaking of those rules or that they're no longer relevant then that also undermines family and their authority so I think that's a particular important tension and there's perhaps a number of other areas that government could have where government could have taken people on the journey of understanding where the gaps were I mean there's something that I would draw a distinction in between Scotland and the UK government I think the First Minister in Scotland is probably closer to departments and there wasn't such a feeling coming from Scottish decision making of a sidelining of expertise in fact if anything there was a much greater involvement of departmental expertise what happened in the UK government was a huge centralisation in number 10 that for the first part of the pandemic suddenly until the end of 2020 that sort of November 2020 things changed again everything was being done by press release there were I think more than 60% of policies were being announced that way which meant they didn't go through the usual policy making process therefore policy documents weren't available 90% of policies announced had in the early stages of the pandemic had no link whatsoever to any evidence base there was nothing there that you'd normally expect and departments were sidelined and departments are where expertise the way they have done in order to attract sidelining of 잘 heldgers and about how measures might affect different communities there were a lot of that opportunity to feed back in and test policies was missed Pickleertime Collomb Joed My organisation specialises in social media so I'll make three quick points этоch unig gyda. Mae'r anhygoel cyffrân o'n argynnu rhaglion gweithio ar gyfer y gened, gan y teulu o'n lle gyda'r chyfe. Mae'r anhygoel wedi'i gweld yn ei amlwg gyda'r ac yn mynd i'r amlwg a'u editio i ddechrau. Felly mae'n mynd i'r anhygoel gyda'r methau, ond rydym iaeth mae oedd yn cael mynd i wedi'u gweld yn cael mynd i yn y pen algorithmau geirdyn nhw yna i chi'n yn ei anhygoel, cael mynd i'r anhygoel a'r anhygoel, yn ymdweud y cwmniol. Roeddwn ni'n gallu ymddiol. Mae'r gwasanaeth os yw'r cyfrindwyr gyda'r company mewn ysgol sy'n gyfrindwyr yn ymddwylliannol. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfrindwyr gyda'r cyfrindwyr, ond o plwynt pethau gydechrau gyda'r cyfrindwyr, os y tu wnaeth ymddiol ymddiol, os ymddiol, o bach o Don Halford? Yes, so I'd like to clarify some points about making things simple for people. We don't necessarily mean making messages simple and authoritarian. We just mean that we need to support the messages with ways that it's easy for them to actually do the things that are best for their health. I do very much agree with Tracey's points that we cannot present false certainty around information, particularly in a crisis because that information is going to change with new evidence and we have to expect that. It may be counterintuitive, but one thing we need to learn is that sometimes we do need to acknowledge this uncertainty and the research actually shows that it's not necessary to avoid presenting uncertainty in the information or the evidence that is currently available. People are actually receptive if we're able to explain what it is we do know, but we don't know and why that's going to change quickly. It could also be a way to signpost that they do need to stay updated and here are the trusted information sources that they should go to to get the latest updates. I'd also like to reiterate the point of actually using more trusted resources. More research has shown that the public has increased their trust in scientists especially, which could actually mean the Government could do more to give the right platforms to connect all these people, the scientists, the healthcare professionals, people working in the NHS with communities or actually also provide them with guidance and training to deal with misinformation that might come out from the communities. I do some work with healthcare workers and what we're hearing is that sometimes they don't know how to address the misinformation because they don't know what the right answer is themselves. One case that came to me last year was a nurse who said, actually my patients are saying their insurance will be invalidated if they get the vaccine and she couldn't hand on heart say that this wasn't the case, so actually being able to have an up-to-date resource, give the healthcare professionals that they can give their patients the information from a source that patients trust is something that the Government could improve on for the next in the future. Thank you and Will Moy. Three points about preparation, good information and audience fragmentation. The first thing to say about the pandemic was it was number one on the UK national risk register. Everybody who thought about this knew it was going to happen and yet we were unprepared for the communication challenge with it and in retrospect I really regret all that small part in that. Good information in a crisis requires a whole of society response. It requires government to work with media, internet companies, civil society organisations, like full fact and the others in front of you, academics and so on. We had not had a direct rehearsal or practice of thinking about what this might look like and that was a badness. We should go through the national risk register and actually game out what would it take to be prepared. One of the lessons full factors learned from this situation has been working with representatives from the UK and Canadian governments, internet companies and civil society organisations around the world to create what we call a framework for information incidents, which sets out in an open and transparent way how you would identify that information incident is happening, what kinds of responses might be called for, how you would say how serious it is and how you would say how effectively that information incident is being responded to. I think it would be well worth for the Scottish Government looking at that framework and having a dialogue about how that might apply in preparation for future emergencies because every emergency nowadays comes with information risks attached to it. That's the first thing. We could have been prepared and we should have been prepared. The second thing is audience fragmentation. Every source of information that is growing in the world now provides different experiences to different users, social media, Netflix, whatever it is. Every source of information that is shrinking provides the same experience to all its users, traditional newspapers, TV, radio and so on. This means that it is easier and cheaper to reach small numbers of people than it's ever been and harder and more expensive to get the same message to everybody. That is a profound challenge for public authorities who are essentially used to thinking if we can get on a state programme or a front page of a newspaper or BBC Scotland or whatever it is, we've got our message out there and that's just not true anymore. Fragmented audiences create opportunities for causing confusion. They create opportunities for people to be in different information environments and being misled and public authorities have to work harder to get good information out in this new environment. I don't think we've adjusted to that reality yet of audience fragmentation. Thirdly, I talked about the unlikely journey of good information having to start from doing the research, doing the analysis and ultimately communicating it. To think about that problem well, you need to think about every stage of that journey. Okay, thank you. Tracy Brown, you wanted to come back in if you are brief. Very brief. Parliaments, I think parliaments need to also look at this. You are our way of screw tonight in government. That's where the parliaments screw tonight's government lies and I think being able to scramble quickly because obviously this presented some practical problems for you about meeting. We've just run evidence week in Hollywood and we do the same in the UK Parliament. How well and quickly you are to question in some of these really complex areas and whether you have the resources you need to do that. I really think that's a question that needs addressing too. Thank you very much. Can I move on to Jim Fairlie, please? Thanks very much, convener. Thanks very much to the panel for turning up. I have to say, when I started reading all of this, there was a band in the 80s that I loved called The Jam and they wrote a song called Going Underground and one of the lines in one of the songs is you choose your leaders and place your trust and that to me is probably the most fundamental thing because all the other nuances that we talked about if we don't trust their leadership none of this is going to matter. Now I could be completely wrong in saying that and I'd be interested to hear your views. But we've got a bit of a dead cut to me because first of all we need that trust and you can come back in on that. But we've got science working at pace trying to keep up with something that we don't yet understand. We've got a public message going out trying to get people to change their entire way of life and at the same time we've got leaders saying but bear with us because we don't quite know what we're doing yet. So given what we've just been through how do we pull all that together because there will be another one that will come how do we pull all that together and make it fit? Very simply, how do we do that? Tracy, I'll start with you. People are very tolerant at the start of the pandemic very tolerant. When we interviewed people from many walks of life for example we talked to unions about their experience and people who were not very supportive of the UK government for example but showed a great deal of empathy for the position that politicians found themselves in. I think opposition parties were very restrained in their criticisms and they were very supportive the media was very restrained in the early days and similarly supportive and empathetic to the unknowns the difficulty of making those decisions so I think what people showed was an enormous amount of tolerance for the situation for the uncertainty that was in that. I think some of this kind of idea that the public need uncertainty is just not well founded I think don't make that point that people actually do trust information when it's got caveats around it as much as anything else. The survey work showed that people's trust in science was pretty rock solid throughout and in fact a medical science went up. So I think that's quite important base to start from that there is a lot of opportunity to have that discussion about the fact that we don't know things that we're making decisions in the absence of perfect knowledge the reason why we're doing research is because we don't know things and that was important too and also perhaps there's a bigger issue here to sort of get across to the world at large that we don't always have to know everything we can have operational knowledge we can make decisions based on just the knowledge we need right now Tracy can I stop here for a wee second can I stop here a wee second I'm going to go back to what both yourself and Will said earlier on when you have that information gap that's when it gets other stuff gets allowed to seep in so there's a time gap there as well so we've got information we're working on it stop living, stay at home let us work it out and in the meantime somebody else is coming in and feeding other information in that is damaging so there's two different things here I think what you're describing is often what may be called a motive gap which is people want to know what's government's reasoning and if, you know, for example the UK government was pointing to sage if you read the sage minutes when you find the good if you read those minutes you could not get from there to the decision people think, well, hang on you must have an economic calculation in here somewhere the policy advice wasn't published the economic advice wasn't published only the science advice was published there was a real lack of transparency elsewhere and people could not see clearly what that motive what the reasoning was what the chain of reasoning was for why particular decisions were made particularly those that seem to have quite adverse effects on them so I think there's a bit of a difference between saying that and saying we don't yet know how long vaccine efficacy will last for or we don't yet know how much transmission there is outdoors there's a real difference between that kind of information gap and saying what have we based our decision on and that is in that second one that I think we have problems and a gap that people are less tolerant of does that answer your question? Does, yeah, yeah well, would you like to come in? sorry you're muted at the moment hold on a wee second Thank you very much I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of trust and therefore trustworthiness from our leaders and we think that boils down to three pretty simple principles firstly you should get your facts right secondly you should get sources for what you say so people can judge it for themselves and thirdly you should correct the record when you make mistakes and by and large if you do that you will learn trust and as Tracy said people gave the benefit of the doubt in this situation whatever trust or distrust they may have had about political leaders in other contexts that they were willing to give people a run at this situation and that was important for people how to live up the area where I think we started to see a risk was where certain public health responses became politicised and I'm thinking of mask wearing in particular where in some places it started to feel like one political drive saw this as a symbol of membership and another political drive saw this as a symbol of giving in to excessive public health response and when that sort of we moved from a pragmatic conversation about how we deal with uncertain facts to a more if you like tribal conversation we're getting into a bad place and I think the UK has been relatively lucky compared to what I know of for example the USA which is a horribly polarised political situation where even vaccination has had some of those but I do think that the way we do politics does have an effect on how we respond to situations like that and the willingness to work in non-partisan ways, the willingness to take heat out of situations and so on that kind of leadership all of it matters, the culture of public life matters when we end up in an emergency OK, thank you Thanks very much, Brian Wittle Thank you Good morning to the panel Thank you for giving your time I think that as we've heard today it seems to me as soon as there was information put into the public domain all of a sudden other experts were springing up trying to say exactly the opposite so I think that if I can ask in the first instance really is we seem to have a deluge of data being able to be collected what's our ability to collate that data and then put that communication into the public domain in a way that can be consumed easily I was thinking potentially that the fact that a lot of data was put onto websites the FACTS website for example NHS Inform website and I'm not sure how many people actually visited that particular website Were the Governments behind the curve if you like in their ability to combat misinformation in that way I'll ask, I'll go to you well if I could You're muted Thank you and I know that Tracy has evidence on this as well I will say that the experience was mixed on the one hand we had some things like the COVID dashboard were used by millions of people and were a really regular source of information and were world class bits of data on the other hand the government did not know how much PPE we had and where we had it the government did not know how many people were living in care homes not what their health status was or anything else literally how many people were in care homes and the data vacuum around social care is thriving and I think it almost certainly cost lives so again in this situation the starting point of having good data and presenting it to the public is collecting it in the first place and one of the lessons from this situation is to look at the data gaps in our public life and start to fill them and recognise that that was a well known problem but we did not know what was going on in social care it suddenly came up in a new way and it could have been avoided so we have to think about that whole journey there are great examples of compiling good data in ways that the public understands the skills exist, the mechanism exist but you have to join all the dots in that unlikely journey of good information to make that happen and in too many places there was something missing somewhere along the line If there's anybody else wishes to come in on that particular question add a supplementary to you Will I think Tracy would like to come in and Dawns Beck Tracy Natsyn survey asked people about where they got information and how they experienced Government sources we had a really astonishing result finding that 35% of respondents said that they visited what was then the PHE data dashboard which is absolutely astonishing because 35% of people normally have no relationship whatsoever the Government website and 15% again I was expecting numbers in the one or two I was really really astonished by that a key thing I think is on social media a cater of people grew up sprung up the actuaries type commentators who guided people towards a lot of those sources people didn't you're right to say that to have skepticism about government putting up an informed page people didn't spontaneously find their way towards them I'm not sure what architecture needs to be in place but clearly gov.uk needs a huge revamp because people for example Sage and others have commented to us as many had before them but they were suddenly struck with this problem of needing to share an awful lot of information that was information they normally publish after a crisis suddenly had to share it in the here and now in real time that gov.uk is not set up to do that so in terms of the supply the data dashboard and the ons serial I think the two success stories that need looking at and looking at the pathways that took people to those places in terms of the other way around I think that Will's mentioned it but I think there are many holes that have been shown you have Ed Huntforsen on at the next session so I think that's a question for him about things that we just don't seem to know for example we didn't know how many people when we had flight bans how many people were construction workers who work abroad for a week and come back at weekends to see their families who really couldn't cope with that kind of additional cost and burden but we didn't know what the impact of a lot of the things were that were imposed upon people and there was many many different groups told us for example chains of charity shops and others told us there was no way of feeding that information back in they were really struggling they got together a lot of them to try and pull information to give the government but they couldn't find the entrance door to put it in night time industries you're probably aware were really struggling with that as well it wasn't all just about economic help it was actually wanting to give information about their sector or their clients or their people who use their services into government so I think there's something to be looked at there I don't know whether it's a stop check or perhaps a mechanism needs to be established in all areas of government policy making for people to input because there's a lot of big data gatherers out there in society now don't think it can only be the job of government I've got to agree Tracy that my mantra has always been that we don't have an IT system that actually can collect and gather the data and give us the output we need I know Dr Hallford wants to come in on this one to address the point about for example experts speaking out what says information out there and just so much information overloaded and I think that there's been a real gap here in not being able to consolidate the consensus of experts around any particular topic because we're both at showing the consensus level in any scientific information as it builds is quite convincing for people to see that this even though it's developing this is where the path is going but I think that is something that could be done better and it also tackles what we've said in our statement about the infrastructure and we don't know what that's going to look like at the moment but with individual scientists on Twitter that can be really powerful in providing guides to what the evidence is and explaining it to people however there is also a danger when individual scientists are debunking this information or fact checking because there's a political nature to some of that disinformation just during the act of fact checking can turn people into seeming well it can lead others to perceive that they're being political when it's actually just basically fact checking that shouldn't be so that's one danger of having individual experts commenting on social media or through individual channels I'm briefly calm hood I know you want something to say here Yeah I'd say really briefly presenting lots of data making it accessible on its own does not solve problems of misinformation indeed the data often become the subject of a battle in terms of this information the best example I can give of this is a US one the VA ERS system which records any instance that takes place after a vaccination that was actually a demand of the anti-vaccine movement many decades ago but it is used by anti-vaccines today to highlight any instance that takes place after a vaccination and claim that it was caused by that vaccination whether it was injury, sickness, whatever so data as a whole and when it's analysed by experts shows that the vaccines are very safe but the data itself is then exploited by bad actors to spread misinformation so there is a comms battle takes place over the data even once it's out there and it's transparent and it's public and we need to be mindful of that Thank you, you know I could spend all day talking about data and collection and how we utilise it if I just ask one more question here though the difficulties for me with what happened certainly in the UK and in Scotland was we used the phrase a lot follow the science without actually explaining what follow the science actually means and of course we had the changing and evolving science as we began to understand more so how did governments respond to that change and how were we able to communicate that sort of change going forward and did that compound the difficulty that we had maintaining a communication line I'll go to Callum first if I could I'll just answer very briefly what other panellists like Tracy have said that the public have shown themselves to be capable of assessing complexities around this and to accept uncertainties around the evidence and around our theories of how dangerous Covid is or when we're going to get a vaccine and what they're going to look like things like how many vaccines we'll have to take many members of the public can understand the uncertainties at play here and understand it's difficult and complex the challenge is in communicating those uncertainties and trying to fill information gaps even if you can only fill them by giving the public the sort of balance of probabilities and we know that there's many people who stand ready on social media to fill those gaps with their own definite and concrete answers if we don't get there first and do that effectively Will I saw you nodding your head is there something you would like to add to that Lee I would just briefly I would say that Tracy will have interesting things to say about the following of science but the other side of this is much of the pandemic management was about being afraid of between public health and the economy and there is not a science for that and I think that was obscured a lot in the political communication and that was actually obscured in the data gathering as well we have much clearer data about what was going on with people's health the health system and what was going on with people's livelihoods and the economic system and so I think thinking about a public health emergency as more than just a public health emergency and the policy decision in more than just about preservation of life we maybe didn't do a very good job of being open with that decision making and that's where over time I think perhaps there was room for distrust to come in Tracy I would assume you would like to comment on the follow the science comment I think it's probably worth noting that the UK Government had just campaigned the Brexit campaign for a leadership and I think there was something of a self-talk going on there to saying actually this isn't like that is it something else we need to do here with the follow the science initially what happened though it seemed and a lot of people pointed to this when we spoke to different communities it seemed like no one was in charge later on so when you asked people what were the basis for this you ask the scientists they say well it's not my decision we just give the advice and you ask the government they say we're following the science and no one seems to actually be responsible for the decision making so I think that became really problematic in relation to that how well the science was followed is another question and a much bigger one than we can deal with today to pick up this point though about there's kind of the science and then the economics and so on I understand what Will's getting at but people have said from that that we've had too much dominance of the outputs of the epidemiological models what actually happened was that we weren't using them very well at all I mean for example if you look at the postage modelers they were more than capable of being able to incorporate closing schools into the models how could we seek to optimise the impact on case numbers by doing the least amount of damage to children's education they would never ask that question so the questions as put became very narrowly focused on reducing cases reducing hospitalisations instead of actually using the tools that were there bring science scientific scenario mapping and so on into policy they were very limited in what they did and now as we've talked about before the Treasury didn't publish any of its own modelling which must have been incorporated some epidemiological material they tell us it did whether it did or not is another question we can't see it but this is something that I think is quite important here you know the science is only going to be that goes into policy is only going to be as respond to the policy questions that are put you know SAGE was not busy going off investigating other questions that were being put to the Cabinet Office and that's what we need to look at is whether those questions really made good enough use of the tools that were needed to look at those kinds of trade-offs Can we move on to John Mason please Thanks very much convener I was intrigued by one or two of the practical examples early on and if I can start with yourself Tracy Brown the concept of the bus leaving the teenager on the road or picking them up because they didn't have a mask on and I'm interested in kind of unpicking that bit I mean maybe the bus driver maybe all bus drivers maybe all of us should have understood better how efficient the masks were what was the ventilation like on the bus how busy was the bus how far was the journey all of these kind of factors but that's probably a bit much to expect the bus driver to assess just right there I mean should it have been his company that was giving him better direction or is it the government should have been giving the bus company a clearer picture of how much flexibility it had what went wrong there and what could we have done better The same sorts of dilemmas were being posed to us by people who were trying to develop the guidance for their organisation and what was particular two elements to this John one is the first there was not enough information that enabled people to put the measures into a context I'll just give you a couple of other examples do you because a teenage girl will not take a Covid test do you allow her foster placement to break because that's the rule now do you as a teacher yell at the kids coming in from break to keep two metres apart or to put their masks on the issue was was one of those things ten times better than the other or equal another example two metre distancing at 1.8 metres people could keep a family crisis centre open they could manage the space to do that was 1.8 metres that much worse than two in terms of did you now cross a transmission threshold it's not that people wanted to see you know reams of data but they did want some analysis to sit behind it or something that put it into a context for them that enabled them to weigh the degree of severity of a risk and the degree of effectiveness of the measures that they were being able to take and therefore could make those decisions so that's one area that needs to be looked at so can I ask you then who should be make every individual bus driver or teacher or family centre be making that decision was it too rigid, was the system too rigid no I think that there is a lack of appreciation of just how centrally in government a lack of appreciation of just how many of those kinds of decisions were then being prompted by the measures that sounded on the face of that very simple mask up didn't think through what this might mean in different settings I've said before more involvement of government departments local and community outreach from government is one way of being more tuned to that but there wasn't that appreciation and if there had been then the kind of information that people could use more effectively would have been forthcoming but clearly it was the responsibility of groups it was local health visiting services or it was people who were ahead of an organisation who were making those recommendations but then that comes into the other issue which is discretion because of course you can look at the bus driver thing and say we'll just use your common sense but in a situation where these rules are being put across almost as public order potential public order offences it's really not clear to people whether they've got that discretion so sometimes governments seem to be saying here's the rule here's the rule and there's a £10,000 fine if you break it and it moved according to whether we were closing down or opening up lots of people said to us we just didn't know whether this responsibility was ours whether in our sector for example small business owners should we be developing our own recommendations or not or could we end up telling our members to break the law or something that's not clear what's guidance what's not so people were missing that bit that they could say well this is what the policy is aiming for and therefore I can see how we could achieve that in our sector without doing harm to people and that's the bit where there was the biggest deficit of what people needed I'm not saying people make good on the spot decisions like bus drivers, I think people's discretion is often fantastic, police also made a lot of sensible decisions bad ones they made but I think there was not a commitment for people to do that either individually or at sector level Okay, thanks for that and will my, your example was with pregnant or potentially pregnant women and the varying advice that kept changing and I just wanted to again explore that one a bit I mean I think as I understand it when the vaccines came out at first they hadn't been tested on pregnant women so logically it was said pregnant women will not be getting the vaccine to start with but in a sense that put a question into people's minds that maybe it was dangerous for pregnant women and maybe Dr Holford you can come in as well because this bit about acknowledging uncertainty and avoiding false certainty well in a sense they did do that with pregnancy they acknowledged the uncertainty but that in itself kind of created a problem did it not? Yes, I think that's fair there is a difference between saying out from an abundance of caution although we have no reason to believe there is a risk for the time being we're going to say hold off a bit and then we're going to run some special tests in order to give you the best possible advice we can and here's the vaccine pregnant women don't take it and the public health messaging was much closer to the second so naturally it plants a seed of doubt in reasonable people's minds and you're talking about a time and a situation where everybody is more health conscious perhaps at almost any other time of life if one wants to protect their child and then you have a series of specific questions so things like can the vaccine cross the placenta into the fetus, what effect would it have on the fetus, that kind of thing about which there were all kinds of uncertainty, there were good scientific reasons to think various answers were true but all that needed unpacking so it's not just sort of should I have a vaccine but what effect will this have on my child and then when in pregnancy can I have this vaccine should I have a second dose if I've already had a booster, lots of practical questions and I think Tracy's point about community engagement if there have been somebody somewhere in the system whose job was just to think about this particular demographic group young people who might, youngish people who might be having children let's make sure we've thought it through from their point of view and somebody else who's thinking about it from point of view of schools and so on it's not obvious but that conversation was happening before this stuff got I wonder if there's a lesson about stakeholder engagement and two-way dialogue in that the final issue I just wanted to raise was the last week we had the Royal Society of Edinburgh giving us evidence and they were quite keen on the idea of some kind of independent fact-checking service so I don't know, maybe that's what some of you feel you're doing people can check with you but I just wondered, I don't specifically have this for anybody but maybe will Molly come in again something that we should be looking at going forward sorry it was Mr Hoot If I may full fact is the UK's independent fact-checking service and we absolutely believe there should be a fact-checking service for Scotland specifically I am hugely disappointed that I cannot come here and talk to you about specific examples from Scotland how the Scottish institutions have performed for those some of our staff are based in Scotland a full fact Scotland which would be based in Scotland dealing with the Scottish Parliament the Scottish Government, Scottish institutions and players is something we really believe in and have tried to explore with Tundas before so we are very open to working with partners to try to develop a fact-checking service in Scotland of Scotland for Scotland and I think it's really important to stress that fact-checking isn't just about publishing fact-checks it's about being a first responder for information that helps other institutions to understand the role they can play in reducing the harm that it does that engages with that full pipeline of good information and has conversations like these that can help ensure informed and improved public debate Okay, thanks very much now we're beginning to run out of time I think but Mr Hoot do you want to come in and then Tracy Brown Just very briefly CCTH is not primarily fact-checking organisation but we are part of an ecosystem of organisations that look at the problems of misinformation and disinformation and the work of people like Will at full fact is really important it's really useful to us to have like he says a first responder who's able to check some of the most prevalent misinformation or disinformation narratives out there and helps us to do our work holding platforms to account on their role in the spread of misinformation so fundamentally seems like a good idea to me Good thanks and Tracy Brown I'm not going to repeat what's being said but related to this one of the recommendations about what counts report is that there should be a publicly responsive trials unit I think that needs to be scoped as to whether it needs to be won in each of the governments of the UK but the idea would be that people can as things are unfolding around them this is raising questions does government have answers for this but also MPs could do that and MSPs could do that so that's something that I think we need to take forward is an opportunity to ask do we actually have the information of are we gathering it because sometimes you can't just respond to misinformation because we don't know we haven't got that stuff at our fingertips and we need to be running more trials as things are rolled out so if someone is alleging that masks are causing harm or someone is alleging that ventilation doesn't work we need to be running trials as those things are rolled out That's great, thank you very much I'd like to thank all the witnesses for their evidence this morning and giving us their time if witnesses would like to raise any further evidence with the committee they can do so in writing and the clerks will be happy to liaise and do that I will now briefly suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses Thank you Now we will continue to take evidence on the inquiry I would like to welcome our second panel to the meeting Dr Nick Finn the organisational lead for strategic engagement and policy in public health Scotland Stephen Webster the regulatory affairs manager of OFCOM and Ed Humpherson for regulation office for statistics regulations Thank you very much for giving us your time this morning As I explained to our earlier panel this is the committee's first evidence session on the inquiry and there will be a further session on 23 June before we hear from the Minister for Public Health, Women's Health and Sport on 30 June Each member will have approximately 10 minutes each to speak to the panel and ask their questions and can I please invite the witnesses to briefly introduce yourselves Thank you I am Stephen Webster and I lead on OFCOM's work on broadcasting and online content in Scotland There are three areas of OFCOM's work that will be of particular interest to this inquiry, I suspect One is our role in enforcing standards across TV and radio particularly how they adequately protect audiences from harm and offence which was obviously heightened during the pandemic We have a duty to promote media literacy across the UK so that's around how citizens are digitally engaged how they are smart and savvy online and indeed how platforms design themselves to make sure that they are accessible to as many people as possible and OFCOM has been named as the UK online safety regulator and the UK Government's online safety bill which is currently making its way through the UK Parliament Thank you very much Good morning, convener My name is Nick Finn I am currently director of Public Health Science and Medical Directorate at PHS The last 20 years have been involved in communicable disease and control both at local and national level I moved to Cullindale in London to work with the health protection agency in 2007 and I ran the pandemic flu office for a number of years I was one of the incident directors in the 2009 pandemic and I've been subsequently involved in a number of major incidents in infectious disease throughout the life of HPA and Public Health England Laterally I was the director for the Centre for Communicable Disease Control in London and then when we moved to be we had a reorganisation I was the deputy director for the Infectious Disease Service At the start of the pandemic I was one of the two incident directors for Public Health England and I moved to Public Health Scotland in January 2021 to take up my current post and I've been involved in leading the Public Health Scotland Covid response since then I've seen both sides I'm Dr Finn Hi, I'm Ed Holmferson I'm head of the Office for Statistics Regulation and what we do is we ensure that statistics serve the public good and we do that by setting the standards that any government department or agency anywhere in the UK must follow when they collect and present and communicate statistics and data through a code of practice which has three principles trustworthiness, quality and value and we also step in where statistics are either not available so there are gaps or where they're presented inappropriately and I think in the context of debates on misinformation which we're talking about today our role is quite focused it's about the public's right to access high quality official statistics and data that's what we're here to safeguard and preserve That's great, thank you very much I'll turn to questions and if I may begin by asking the first question Stephen, if I can come to you just enforcing a standard do you think that misinformation has increased during the pandemic or do you think it's always been there? It's something we don't have a huge amount of data on unfortunately when we were expected to become the UK's online safety regulator we did commission some research in around 2019 to look at the kind of harms that were prevalent online and misinformation was up there it was the third most cited source of harm back then we would have liked to have continued that research and that would have been an interesting trendset going into the pandemic but we weren't able to carry out comparable research given that we weren't able to go in and do face-to-face interviews and things since then so we don't have reliable trend data since a brief pandemic what we did see during the pandemic was actually in the early stages was when misinformation was most often cited by people for coming across it and then that leveled out over the following two years albeit there was still and actually the issues you were seeing were different as time went on as well so there was an interesting trend within the pandemic but I don't quite have the evidence space to see how it's changed pre-pandemic to now I just remember in the beginning of the pandemic probably going back to March there was a lot of social media about Italy at the time and what they were going through and then all of a sudden it just disappeared and you couldn't get any information from that either from my perspective and my experience given I've had responsibility for vaccination both in England and now in Scotland vaccines are one area where we tend to see a lot of people with very strong views one way or another and those people with strong views tend to broadcast them using social media and if you were to look at the number of social media sites which are promoting vaccine compare them to the number where the view is against it it's quite staggering it's about 100 to 1 and I'm paraphrasing because this number is constantly changing but it's suffice it to say there are many more sites promoting messages against vaccination than there are promoting it and so I mean MMR scare back in the late 1990s early 2000 we've been struggling against that people who almost saw the evidence from Wakefield as a sort of banner a rallying call and as a consequence it's really been an uphill struggle to try and put forward the facts and I think the way that it's been approached by and large has been to stick to the facts not to direct the confront people and over a period of time provide the evidence that people can then see but from my perspective I've certainly seen a lot of it around for a number of years thank you I don't have any more evidence than Stefan I do have a sort of perception and I'll share that and the perception is that the pandemic our attention on one issue where misinformation was particularly rife I think that's more plausible than saying there was a sudden surge in the volume of misinformation it was more that everybody was looking at one issue across not just our society but across the world and that not only highlighted all of the data and statistics but it also shone a light on the extent to which there is a degree of misinformation thank you if I can move on to Finn regarding Public Health Scotland what has been done to evaluate the public health communication throughout the pandemic? I think it's important to state at the outset that when the pandemic started Public Health Scotland's role was mainly in terms of advisory providing the information and the data Scottish Government took control of the communication which was the role that many Governments have done which is to try and ensure a consistent one version of the truth which I think is incredibly helpful when you're trying to provide factual information throughout the pandemic we've conducted a number of surveys and I'm very happy to give the committee links and to give the committee the reports which demonstrate that trying to understand the effectiveness of the message trying to identify communities where it is problematic we've used the data from things like vaccine uptake from the data we have around a number of cases to try and focus in on those areas and usually those are around areas of deprivation where there are minority groups and it's then about trying to provide information that's sensitive both culturally and linguistically and working through community leaders which was actually a state something that happened as the pandemic evolved initially there was an information sharing and then it was appreciated for certain communities working with leaders within those communities sometimes faith leaders giving them the information was key way of providing information to that community those were respected individuals who spoke often with authority and for whom people would listen to rather than some of the standard means but you know we had information saying that there were problems with the blind with the deaf and what we tried to do is to try and provide appropriate material to try and address their means and again I'm happy to provide some examples of that to committee who would wish that's great that's very helpful just a brief reminder that if we cannot name individuals just during this evidence session thank you good morning to the panel I wonder if I could just follow up that the community's last question is to you Dr Finn and I was very interested that your perspective had changed because you were working south of the border and then moved north during the course of the pandemic in terms of the public health campaign and how effective there were I remember there was a quite effective slogan we saw coming out of the UK health department hands face space I don't know if that was your brainchild no it's not but in Scotland we had facts and I've yet to find an enemy who could tell me what facts stood for so any can you help us out? can you remember what facts stand for? I have to say that I was south of the border at that time I'm afraid I can't but in answer to your question very much communications was led centrally we would provide the advice the hands face space was something that was developed by cabinet office and the department of health and social care we provided the facts they tried to then make it into something memorable I was rather on the fair question on facts but the point that I was trying to make was it was designed to be a simple message but in actual fact ended up unduly complex and I wonder just following up on the convener's question is there work being done to try and understand how effective that sort of message was did it cut through with the public was it easily understood I think the other thing I just want to say that Scotland doesn't work on its own we work as part of the UK so we would be contributing to SAGE which is a scientific advisory group on emergencies we would also be inputting into spy B which is the behavioural scientist group and very much we would be looking to those committees and groups to advise on the best approach that we could recommend with respect to that in terms of evaluation again I won't go through some of a number of pieces of evaluation that have been done I don't have them to hand but I'm very happy to provide the committee with those at later date or whenever Okay, thanks One issue that was touched on by my colleague Alec Rowley in the previous panel was about how messages were communicated so we saw regular briefings on television in the early years of the campaign Do you have any evaluation on who were the best communicators of these messages insofar as so we saw politicians we saw Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon giving these messages we also saw people like Jason Leitch Isown South Chris Whitty Did people take these messages better from politicians or from those who are medically professional in these areas I don't have any specific evaluation done during this pandemic but I'm aware that work that's been done with the members of the public about who they would trust consistently doctors, medical professionals have rated very highly and I think we're looking at something like 70% or 80% politicians tend to be in the lower half of the curve Very diplomatically poot That's the Big Sosmoree Varacity Index which has been referred to that and those are indeed the findings Okay, thank you Just one more thing I wanted to ask and maybe I could bring in Stefan Webster too from Ofcom's perspective Clearly throughout the pandemic there were stages where the UK were doing different things at different times and the rules were changing So people would be watching the 6 o'clock news and hearing a message from Chris Whitty or the UK Government saying one thing and watching then the Scottish news where Nicola Sturgeon or Jason Leitch would be saying something different Is there any evidence that caused confusion with the public was that a problem that was identified I'm not sure if there's any specific research that went into that I would say just in terms of the mediums that were used I can see there was logic behind using television as a way to reach a mass audience quickly We asked people where they were getting their news about Covid-19 from right throughout the pandemic and three quarters of the online population in Scotland were using the BBC initially The second most cited source was other traditional broadcasters so the likes of STV Channel 4 and Sky News followed by social media and official sources as well Obviously within that there will be differences within the age groups But I think we saw huge audiences for those news shows that you mentioned there I think both the Reporting Scotland and the STV News at 6 both had record viewing shares throughout 2020 and into 2021 The BBC's decision to carry briefings were getting obviously huge It was a good way to get messages across and using commercial advertising was a way to get messages out of across as well I can see there was clearly logic in using that albeit you typically get an older audience on TV and we watched a lot of television in Scotland across the year in 2020 it was more people watched on television in Scotland than any other UK nation One final point just for clarity Does Ofcom have any role in policing what's on the internet Do you have any lookers in that at all? Not at the moment You'll be aware that UK Government's proposing an online safety bill it's very much a live issue I think committee stage at the House of Commons has began at the moment so that will give us a role in how they protect their audiences from a range of harm so that's something that's very much a live issue One of the last members, the last panel talked about us as a country being unprepared on communications so there's lots planning went in for different emergencies I think there was criticism that we were unprepared for Covid because we were more prepared for a flu like but their statement was we were unprepared on communications Would you agree with that? If so, what is it that we need to learn and what is it that we need to be better prepared for moving forward? Let's start with Stefan I think I'll go back to what I said previously the role of we're very lucky in this country I think we heard earlier about some place abroad where we don't have as high trust in some of our traditional media sources we have trusted accurate and partial news in Scotland it's well regarded, it's highly viewed so using them as a medium to get messages across makes sense from that regard albeit it gets a particular audience and you have to there's challenges with fragmentation that mean you need to use other sources as well and I'm not sure how well that's maybe understood in terms of reaching younger audiences and underserved audiences like Dr Finn mentioned earlier Yeah, thanks, Ed I think if you look at where we have ended up in terms of the presentation and communication of statistics and actually evidence more broadly we've got this fantastic mechanism called the daily dashboard which is now there in Scotland it's had over 45 million hits very very helpful allows people to drill down to a local level you've got a clarity of definition around what is meant by a case or hospitalisation or a death unfortunately you've got an understanding that you need to focus on excess deaths and indeed you as a committee discussing excess deaths and more broadly there are now mechanisms for getting the science advice that government receives into say just Nick mentioned getting that promptly into the public domain all of those things I've just mentioned are bits of infrastructure and definition and technology and data collection that have been developed sort of in an iterative way through the pandemic and I think that I suppose a lesson to learn is to say those things should be kept in mothballs because even if we don't need them on a daily basis right now they are the infrastructure which helps rapid and efficient and I think effective communication of statistics and data to the public all of which is to say that none of those things were sort of in a game plan on 1 March 2020 Dr Finn Yes, I think it's an interesting question and the question is probably prepared for what for many I mean the first SARS related incident was back at the turn of the century where we saw SARS SARS-CoV as it was at the time and that was a disease that suddenly raised people's awareness of the pandemic potential because the last pandemic had been really back in in 1969 which was an influenza pandemic and although it raised the profile there were relatively few cases at a global level from that pandemic and it was actually controlled within a reasonable period of time we then saw the emergence of H5N1 which was an avian flu and this suddenly rekindled the prospect of seeing a pandemic similar potentially either to the 2018 the 1890 the 1958 or the 1969 pandemic which were all flu related so the theme at that time was flu and I was actually part of the WHO advisory committee looking at pandemic planning and communication was a key issue that everyone's recognised and we've recognised that since the 2009 pandemic and in fact one of WHO's themes is crisis communication the pandemic flu plans that were developed by the UK in 2011 had a strong emphasis on communication and I know that for the 2009 pandemic we were prepared or the UK government was prepared to support stocks of paper which was stored in a warehouse so that when it was decided a letter could be sent to every single household in the UK letting them know what was happening and providing the most information so there have been a lot of thought given to communication being ready paper was stockpiled drafts were being written but I think in this particular instance what happened was it wasn't the expected scenario and I think over the last eight years we have seen thinking change so moved away from a pandemic and in 2018 WHO brought in this notion of disease X and disease X being a communicable disease with the potential for a pandemic and the change there was and they opened up to other issues it was in 2018 so given the time it takes for some of these things to develop and evolve it was unfortunate that in 2019 we saw the emergence of SARS because I think taking that disease X approach which there was a very strong emphasis on crisis communication could potentially put us in a better condition better state timing was unfortunate everything was focused around a flu pandemic because that was thought most likely and communications were formulated around that but I would say that a lot of thought had gone in to what would be needed for communicating and we were able to activate that reasonably quickly trying to order several hundred tonnes of paper and therefore thinking strategically to make sure it's stockpiled was part of the thinking Can I just briefly, Steffan ask a question communication and I think television was the main way that and I think the success of that was the vaccine uptake despite all the misinformation on social media but is there a balance there in terms of so we had the first minister every day doing this press conference near enough and I think the viewing figures show the majority were very much up for wanting to hear what was happening but you then did have those who were saying well this is political bias you had the odd bob going to the BBC and trying to create problems so where does that leave you in terms of we have a crisis we need to communicate but we have other politicians saying they are getting an unfair advantage how do you deal with that we did deal with that so I think the BBC themselves had people expressing their views to them about their coverage of the briefings and they made their way to us as well I think throughout the pandemic the main area of the broadcasting code we were focused on was protecting from harm and offence there was a different issue in terms of the Scottish Government's briefings that was a due impartiality question and that was you know typically we have a BBC first approach to dealing with complaints which is unique for the broadcasts that we regulate that means we would expect the BBC to investigate and give their own view as to whether they have breached the broadcasting code on those grounds before Ofcom would look at it that did happen so it came to us and we looked at a number of Scottish Government briefings over a period of time and decided not to investigate them we felt there was sufficient challenge so when you talk about due impartiality it doesn't mean the same amount of time needs to be given to one view and the other it's about context and we felt with the examples we assessed that there was sufficient context and challenge presented to the Scottish Government in those briefings whether through journalist questions that came at the end of many of those briefings and then I think the BBC themselves actually changed their approach at some point and introduced other expert views and occasionally opposition politicians as well to give additional views, additional context to what they'd heard in the updates so in our view the BBC did uphold its requirement to report with due impartiality throughout the pandemic so when you've got an issue which is contentious and there's debate on social media so for example the vaccines is an obvious one although I think the majority people were for the vaccines but say the masks which is maybe a bit more of a grey area and there's been issues some masks are useful, some masks are not or no masks are useful and masks are very useful I mean how are you expecting the broadcasters to deal with that should they be giving time to the kind of anti-vax and anti-mask people as well so the freedom of expression is really important here when it comes to broadcasters so and there's a distinction between the regulated TV and radio sector and social media broadcasters are free so to discuss any issue they wish they can challenge conventional wisdom and actually in a public health crisis where a lot of restrictions are put on it it's only right that they're questioning things and the decisions that are being made if they are going to do that though and we made it very clear to broadcasters by issuing guidance early on in the pandemic they have to do in a way that provides context doesn't undermine public health information and ultimately protects audiences from harm and I think there's a success story from TV and radio in that of all the thousands of hours that covered Covid-19 since March 2020 we found eight programmes in breach of the broadcasting code for not sufficiently doing that and they were minority interest channels that probably weren't high-reaching but nonetheless didn't quite provide that level of protection that we would expect a broadcaster to provide a different story on social media where it's not a regulated sector and there aren't the same kind of requirements you said doesn't undermine public health information but the advice was changing as we went along and again on something like masks some people were claiming that they would harm you because you'd keep all your bugs and you'd get more of them again the balance there between what is maybe the public health information is wrong so I mean what happens then and I think the context is important so I think it's fine to challenge that and you can question things but making clear where the evidence is and if there is evidence and official information coming out there it should be made clear to audiences that the full range of information is there and that they are ultimately going back to where the evidence is saying is reliable Ok, thanks Dr Finn, in answering the convener I got the impression correct me if I'm wrong that you're basically saying that Public Health Scotland your job is to present facts and not to really counter the misinformation and just kind of hope that the facts will eventually win out I don't think it's hope I think that's what experience has shown and that was the approach that was taken with the MMR scare back in 2000 and basically it was felt that by engaging all you actually tend to do is to raise the profile and invariably there is a risk that actually you gather in more people who are supporting the notion that there is potentially a problem with the vaccine and the experience was that actually not engaging directly with these individuals and continuing to promote through evidence research where you can the message is really important and using any opportunity we have so we would use that through a web page where information was contained but again it's dependent on people actually visiting it I think one of the commentators session mentioned 35% people were looking at the UKGov website which is actually an extremely high percentage for something that is often considered rather dry and difficult to use so the approach was not to engage directly but to continue to provide good reliable evidence from trusted source and that trust is really really important and would you expect other people like maybe politicians to be countering the misinformation or do you just think none of us should do that? I mean I would hope that politicians would counter that certainly we did briefings and information was provided the chief medical officer would obviously brief and provide information I don't think there was a concerted effort to try and engage politicians and use them as a sort of force maybe that's something that perhaps we should be considering in the future but I'm not aware that that was a deliberate policy achievement or objective I was going to come to you next Mr Humphrieson but if you want to comment on that just coming on that point I think that it is very important to be timely and effective in responding to misinformation there's an art to doing it and one thing that we've learned through our work with official statistics is to avoid overly repeating the thing that you think is wrong because then you give it more oxygen much better approach is to reassert what you think is what you know to be right and I'll give you a concrete example of this I was in another parliament maybe 400 miles or so south of here a couple of months ago and I was asked a question about a particular figure which I regard as grossly misleading this MP asked me this question about it and I said I'm refusing to repeat that number back to you because I dislike it so much and then I said about three or four times what the correct number was and to me that's really important because if you start to repeat the number you just give it more attention and oxygen much better to re-emphasise the question the correct figure as opposed to retreading your way through the misleading figure itself does that make sense? That does make sense but it leads me on to one or two other questions so is it part of your role or your office's role or your colleagues role to then tick off or challenge organisations that misuse statistics or data or come up with false ones or where are you in that? Yes but subject to fairly clear conditions so what we want is for the public to have confidence in statistics and data produced by the Scottish Government the UK Government, all the departments and so on the main way in which there could be that lack of confidence is that the figures aren't good they lack quality or they're not relevant to people and that's where most of our work takes place it's upstream of the things we're talking about today it's to do with the collection of data and the methodology and what questions the data seek to answer but one risk factor which is the subject of today is that the way the statistics are presented either directly misleads as to the underlying statistics actually say or creates the risk of others to reach those leading interpretations and in those circumstances we do step in and we have done so repeatedly through the pandemic usually in the form of addressing a public statement to the relevant government department from me or from one of my colleagues So would you have a relationship with Ofcom or with BBC or how does that work? Certainly with Ofcom indeed with Ofcom we meet periodically and sort of exchange cases but we sort of say we've been looking at this this is how we are reading it this is how you are reading it even though Stefan and his colleagues have a different locus of responsibility looking at broadcasters the underlying judgment space is quite similar what are you forming a judgment on what evidence are you drawing on what criteria are you using so there's a very healthy professional exchange with Ofcom and actually with the advertising standards authority as well to undertake a similar role Okay and I think my final point then last week we had the Royal Society of Edinburgh suggesting they'd like to see an independent kind of fact checking service I mean would you understand that would that just duplicate what you're doing or do you think that might be useful? No it'd be tremendously useful, would be a fantastic complement so when we do work looking at how the UK Government has collected or presented statistics and data we have a really good alliance particularly with full fact you heard from earlier but a range of other fact checking organisations that look at facts and information circulating at the UK media level so that's great, they are first responders it was a very nice phrase that we heard earlier they are first responders and they can sometimes bring our attention to things we'll go into the government department and say there may be an issue here we do all of the same activities for Scotland we have a team based here and we're very just as active and you can look at our website and see how many things we've done involving Scotland but we don't have the counterparty of the first responders we don't have that sort of broader civil society kind of ecosystem to form an alliance with and I think it would really enhance well I'm not saying enhance the effectiveness of our work but who really cares about that I think it would enhance the quality of public discourse for Scotland, for the Scottish people and then therefore enable statistics to better serve the public good so that's a long-winded way of saying very strongly support that suggestion that's great, thank you good morning to the panel it's good to see you here in person if I could start with Mr Humpherson there I think I've long talked about the need to create systems where we are not just a collection but a ability to collaborate communicate our ability to use that data in the most effective way it's not where it should be not just in Scotland but in the UK as well and I think the pandemic has highlighted that to a great degree that we need to do better so where are we with that what lessons are we learning from that what actions have been taken or a sort of background IT system that allows a colossal amount of data to be to be gathered and collated so I think we've focused a lot in our remarks so far on or I at least have on the data that were collected, were presented, were used but just as important I think is the gaps what wasn't available and how to address gaps for us we saw in Scotland really salient and really significant worrying gaps, one was around data in covering social care and that's by the way not just care homes it's all recipients of social care whether it's in a care home setting or in a demerciliary at home context the second a gap is primary care what's going on in the primary care sector people presenting to GPs as opposed to the core and interest system and also statistics and data on ethnicity in particular and understanding different impacts on different communities now the first two of those in particular I think speak to a pattern in public service delivery is tending to focus more on the collection of operational data for the delivery of the Q end of the NHS where there's an awful lot of focus and there's tremendous attention to waiting lists and resources and so on and much less on the things which are going on outside out in the community if you look at Audit Scotland reports since time immemorial they really highlight this imbalance between the acute sector and the community primary social care sectors so I would say that the good news is there was a time when it was just us saying these things and we would be doing reports and you know quite firmly perhaps aggressively saying this is a problem which needs to be fixed this is 2017-2018 now I think there's much more widespread recognition of the things that I've just mentioned within the NHS indeed within Public Health Scotland doing really good work on social care in particular I think we now need to actually get on and fix it and fix those gaps ensure the data are collected that they're usable, they're accessible and that they're explained as well so I would say I would not be saying the job is done I'd say at least there's a start now I'm going to follow on to that with you Dr Fenn I think it would be remiss of me given that who you represent here given that we're mentioned specifically this week in an evidence session we took evidence last week in private and one of the things that one of the professors who was a Government adviser said to us was that it was so hard almost impossible to get data from Public Health Scotland that they stopped asking for it now this is not a I'm not in attack mode here and I don't want you to be in defence mode here but I'm just saying that because you know what we need to do is look back and learn and look forward how we deliver better better services, better communications so from a Public Health Scotland perspective given that statement what would Public Health Scotland be doing to improve that access to data going forward and to a better solution without being defensive I don't recognise that because one of the things that we've been doing is we've been working with various people, UK HDR which is the UK an organisation which is trying to develop research networks and improve access to research data and in fact we've had various resources, donated money to improve infrastructure that would allow data linkage is one of the key factors which allows us to draw together all the disparate information systems to try and use them to answer some key systems and there was a system which was a joint initiative with Public Health Scotland and some of the Scottish universities called EVE2 which was the it's got two names so forgive me one was the early pandemic evaluation and antivirus and enhanced surveillance which then became the early estimation of vaccine and antiviral effectiveness so EVE2 and this was a project that was born out of the 2009 pandemic which was activated at the beginning of the pandemic and essentially what this project tried to do was to bring together and link data systems and provide researchers with access to that data in secure environments and that's probably one of the key things in a secure way to allow them to do that research now obviously we do get requests which we have to reject because either they are the breach of patient confidentiality they may be considered unethical there may be a variety of reasons but we have a system and another one is called EVE2 which is really working with the research community to try and channel researchers in a way that means that the research is done to a high standard so that's one of the reasons why I'm saying I don't quite recognise that because we have those systems in place to try and facilitate access to research there are blocks to research and I think we're gradually overcoming the systems ones however we've got to recognise that confidentiality a patient's right to privacy and we cannot give unfettered access to all of the information we have I mean there are places where there are systems that can tell what the citizen does in China and Russia and I'm not suggesting we go down that route but there are issues in place that we have to respect around patient confidentiality and indeed it has been an issue both in Scotland and England around primary care trying to access to primary care because in Scotland they've had to ask each practitioner for permission to access the data and there are a fairly large number of practices and that's quite time consuming and in England a regulation was passed and it had to be shared so slightly different approaches but definitely wanting to work with researchers we've co-published many pieces of research with academia and researchers and you know a lot of our work is based on having the research to then develop good evidence and guidance and it would be really interesting to get together to find where the disconnect is because there are two significant players so it would be interesting to understand where the disconnect is and just to find the one small question just following on from my colleague John Mason they are around the way in which television and radio they put the information across because if you think early on that science evolves early on in the pandemic you just mentioned a Nicola Sturgeon coming on and seeing the masks weren't the evidence wasn't there for masks and of course as the science evolved the evidence was there for masks so early on you would be in a public health environment you'd be saying you've got to be careful what you say and then that completely changes you're not then susceptible to free speech when you're preventing people from saying one thing and then it becomes the reality every bit later on I think with that particular example context is key again I can't remember the specific discussions around that but if you're accepting that this is a fast moving situation and things are changing as long as you're providing that context to an audience is the kind of context we'd be looking to in that example can I come in on just the points around data as well if I may I think we all agree of the importance of good data and evidence based decision making that's something we do offcom as well but as important as good data are the skills to interpret it and understand what's going on and there is a skills gap and that's where media literacy comes in of the adult population and the centre of people believe everything they see and around a third of people don't question truthfulness or don't understand or don't know things and just take things as read and actually to go back to Mr Mason's point around fact checking sites there's clearly value in having them there and we've linked to them ourselves throughout the pandemic but if you don't have the skills to understand what they're saying and even get there and get online they have a limited impact thank you I'm going to refer back to my original question back in the previous panel we had the what are they called some of the stuff that they had written down, key challenges of communicating public health messages during the pandemic relate to maintaining public knowledge of and trust and quickly changing information, combat information underpin the evidence and recommendations this statement is a critical role of public trust in institutions during a crisis it's important to bear in mind how to tackle any challenges while maintaining public trust in health authorities and governments eds, trust, quality value, those are the things so I want to come back to the point I made earlier and none of what we're talking about matters if the public don't trust what it is that they're getting is there now this is now becoming politicised right at the start of the pandemic it wasn't there was no political arguments but now it is and we're sitting in this chamber we're sitting in this committee and it gets political we currently have a breach of trust right now in the UK Government because of the Prime Minister and I'm genuinely not trying to make this political it's about if we have another situation coming forward because we're not out of the pandemic there are still things happening that it could still be another variant how do we maintain the level of trust that we had at the start of this pandemic given the situation that we're currently in because everything else that we're talking about is utterly irrelevant if the public don't trust what it is that we're telling them I'll come to you first well thank you and I've been racking my brains to think of a way of answering which quotes a jam lyric and I'm sorry if I don't come up with one who's listening to this who isn't in the second hand they'll be like what is he talking about but anyway I'll see what I can do we start by thinking about what is it that supports public confidence in statistics and data but I think the answers we get to actually have a broader reach I think they have a wider reach and I think they can potentially provide some of the answers to the bigger questions that you're asking which I will say are not really my responsibility but we're not shy of saying actually there's something quite good going on here we think it can have broader relevance so what have we learned we've learned that it's no good just putting the numbers out if you just put the numbers out we use the phrase dump the numbers out you run into problems of firstly of potentially confusing people running into maybe some of the literacy issues that Stefan was mentioning you also create the risk of other people can then tell their stories and you're not there to rebut them with the correct interpretation and finally you lose any benefit of making definitions and what we call metadata in statistics the way the data compiled available so other people can pick up the data and use them and create all insights and there was a lot of that in the pandemic armchair epidemiologists doing that so what do you need to do other than just dump the data out you need to make the data accessible you need to make it downloadable you also need to be very clear on the interpretation that the professional statisticians are putting on it what they think it means and what they think it doesn't mean and there are examples where that wasn't done what it doesn't mean but you need to get into some subsequent episodes of misinformation and then you also pay attention to what we call quality you pay attention to the strengths and limitations of the data and to value and value is about engaging with an audience understanding what that audience wants to know and how your statistics and data serve that so if you pay attention to trustworthiness and transparency if you pay attention to explaining quality and if you pay attention to a conversation around value, engagement you get the kinds of results that we got from the excellent Public Health Scotland dashboard which did command public confidence and actually Tracy Brown's figures about the number of people who are going to government websites and the ONS I think are entirely relevant for Scotland so you get this model of TQV I think there is quite those principles of openness and transparency of explanation and of engagement are really powerful beyond communications, data and statistics I think for health information or for policy choices they are really good guides so my answer to your question what could we do I'd say pay attention to what we call TQV trustworthiness quality and value one of the things that Tracy did say was science fed and the policy was restricted by the questions being asked by the politicians of the scientists because that whole trust thing when I hear that if I'm a conspiracy theorist I'm thinking are the politicians only asking the questions that they want the answers to so is that factually correct that scientists only answer the questions that politicians put to them in the way a politician puts it no I think we try to give a rounded objective assessment the situation clearly there are policy issues for which specific information is wanted and we try to provide as rounded and as objective evidence as we can clearly once people have it they may wish to choose interpreter in a different way and we see that with the media a lot where they will take a statement and they will either project it one way or another sometimes I think to try and capture the attention and to try and get the readers to read there or to buy the newspaper so it is tricky and what we've always tried to do particularly with the statistics and robustness to them and if there are errors we will admit it and we'll change them as quickly as we can we do that with the information we have if we find a correction on our material we will correct it as soon as we can which is usually within 24 hours once it's been pointed but trust is a really interesting thing because once you lose it it's incredibly difficult to get back and it's something that I put effort into and we'll try we'll not get myself into position where we're saying things that are counter to what I know is not right or to be wrong we will give objective information but as I say ultimately how that is used or interpreted we have no control over and the media is a very good example of that That takes me straight on to you Stephen Talking about how the messages were put out how the media was used I think broadly in this country television is very trusted but is there a print media not so much I think there is definitely on both sides there will be there are certain papers I won't buy and there will be other folk going the other way in terms of public ownership is that important for people's trust in the media that they're getting from television Public ownership Public ownership of of the media I think you're right to point out that our broadcasting is usually trusted when we ask audiences what the most important value of public service media is it's accurate and impartial news that's what they want to see from their broadcasters and the distinction between broadcasters and newspapers is that broadcasters are a high-reach and high-trusted platform newspapers have been on a downward trajectory in terms of sales for many years now as is TV viewing of course but to a lesser extent there's no one thing that's going to stop misinformation but I think the best counterweight to it is accurate and impartial news and I think we see that we have that in this country with our broadcasting and we see that with the way audiences flock to them at moments of huge importance we saw that at the start of the pandemic and even this year as well we've seen, you know, when the invasion of Ukraine began news across our public service broadcasts has went up as well so we have that and it's something I think we should look to maintain in a public service broadcasting sector okay, thank you that's great, thank you we've got a few more minutes in Dr Finch if I could just ask you one last question given all your experience and background in visage the enormity in the scale of Covid-19 that hit us in March 2020 no, I mean I think it would be fair to say that we were preparing for a pandemic but we put in place measures that we thought would be reasonably effective at trying to control the spread so there was a large stockpile of PPE it was based on flu which it was there for 12 weeks which is what we would expect which is what we saw with consecutive pandemics these are very rapidly escalating incidents and then they will tail off there were anti-viral stockpiles there were anti-biotic stockpiles there was equipment stockpiled all ready to be used in the event of a pandemic we had telephone lines set up there were call centres distribution systems so there was a lot in place and I didn't expect to see anything like this it seemed to be almost like a domino effect once one country locked down every other country seemed to feel that they had to do the same and it's worth noting that Sweden who didn't lock down an enormous amount of pressure was put on them by the countries to do the same which was to lock down was never an anticipated response to a pandemic we talked about restricting potentially closing schools there are various scenarios portrayed but the whole country locked down was not one of the responses that was ever envisaged so in that sense it was a surprise the only other thing to say is that I think over a number of years public health agencies have struggled because we've seen successive reductions in resources people think infectious diseases is not so much of an issue now and one of the things that we had to change our thinking was that the early stage is to think big and to think bold so that you can actually make a difference at a very early stage the mindset that a number of us had been adopting over a number of years so one of the things that have come out of it is we need to be thinking about future investment and preparedness for a whole number of agencies to be able to communicate to get the data to provide the analysis to inform policy I'm going to bring in Brian Whittle but we're very short on time I'll be very quick to find that place following on from the community I wonder what you think about the impact of SARS and avian flu had on our thinking given that it was the avian few that suspected that there could be 50,000 deaths from that in the UK and it turned out to be about 464 or something like that that stat did that influence the way in which we approached this particular project? The avian flu was H5N1 and that was because an outbreak identified in South East Asia and everyone was thinking that this could be the start of another pandemic because historically most pandemics seem to originate in the Far East, South East Asia and eastern parts of Russia so that H5N1 which was around about 2004 certainly raised the profile of the pandemic flu thinking in 2009 where we had H1N1 swine flu the initial predictions were 1% mortality but as we got into it that rapidly dropped to something like 0.01% and the number of deaths we saw in the UK and globally were not what was anticipated and that's actually quite important to bear in mind because to some extent that was at the back of people's minds when they're saying, do we declare this anodd your emergency based on what happened in 2009 and how confident are we and there was a lot of hesitancy potentially around actually wanting to do it Thank you Just a couple of minutes and I'll add and then Jim Fairlie I'm not going to say that before the pandemic I predicted or anything like that that would be completely false but one thing which didn't surprise me in the pandemic was this I used to go and give presentations to senior government officials across the UK and I'd have this pitch which was don't think of your statistics and data as being an elite sport just for you as policy makers that come up with wise policies that enable you to run your country as well think of them as a public asset they're collected from people they're collected from society it was quite an emotional pitch about how important statistics were to civic life and the eyes would always glaze over and I think they imagined I was inhabiting some kind of fantasy land where the population was interested in statistics and looking at them every day and using them to guide their choices and it turned out I wasn't living in a fantasy land and exactly that's what we saw and I wasn't surprised by that because the reason we were saying that was because of our work engaging with we could see this latent first for insight that statistics and data could have not just from experts but from the population in general so that element of the pandemic didn't surprise me I promise to be very quick to yourself Dr Fin as a sheep farmer foot and mouth shut that's it stop moving if we've got another pandemic coming what would your advice be well if we'd another pandemic we'd have to understand exactly what we're dealing with let's assume it's one that we don't know what is outcome we don't know how many people are going to kill we go back into that same scenario what would your advice be on day one you're making the assumption we know what the pandemic we're dealing with there is a pandemic and actually making the call to be determined by WHO and that involves gathering data over a number of weeks in order to do it so just going back to Covid the first indications were an unusual flu in China we saw the data the genetic data was published by China in mid January and we then used that to say this is similar to SARS-CoV the original SARS from first principles we'd try and use that to say it spreads in this way these are the effects these are the potential implications etc so that would then guide the activities that we'd advise and at that point when the SARS-CoV-2 was emerging the decision was watching and waiting what was happening in China because if you recall back in January they put the whole of Wuhan into complete lockdown that was 40 or 50 million people and the view was that should restrict it to China so based on past experience there was a hesitancy about saying this is a pandemic and then let's take the actions of course pandemics just don't suddenly appear they always hit the first cases and so it's about being prepared putting measures in place at borders starting to gear up what we're doing for the early detection and then thinking through what the policy implications might be based on our best understanding of the organism we're dealing with and flu was the assumption it turned out to be something slightly different and with slightly different characteristics such as spread while people were asymptomatic or without symptoms which was not factored in in a flu pandemic because flu is infectious when you're symptomatic so understanding the organism is really key to the measures you would take okay great thank you very much I'm very conscious of a time of five minutes over so I'd like to thank all the witnesses for your evidence this morning and giving us your time if witnesses would like to raise any further evidence with the committee they can do so in writing the committee's next meeting will be on the 9th of June to consider the coronavirus recovery and reform Scotland Bill at stage 2 that concludes the public part of our meeting this morning and I suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave and for the meeting to move into our private part thank you