Well, all right, well, thank you, Crystal, for the introduction. I'm just going to tell you a bit about what it is, who we are and what we do, and a lot of what I talk about will be COVID 19. And then if I have time at the end, I'll go through in brief what we do in peacetime in case that's of interest as well. So the Science Media Centre is an independent press office. We were set up in 2002. That was after there'd been several kind of high profile front page stories that went a bit wrong.
So things like the MMR and autism health scare GM crops Franken foods when they were first being discussed and in CJD. So these were the kinds of headlines that we had at the time scary, scary stuff about the harms of vaccines. Around that time, there was a House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee hearing on science in society.
Several people who gave evidence not hearing mentioned these fake stories and said that one of the common factors was that we didn't hear enough from scientists and experts. We knew what the evidence was, so we heard plenty from campaigners and politicians and people with an agenda. We didn't hear enough from people who actually knew. Is this something we should be worried about or not?
So what was proposed was an independent organisation that would work with the scientific community and the mass media to put these two groups of people in touch with each other, more often more efficiently within the timescales that are useful to journalists to try and avoid any unwarranted health scares, to try and make sure that media coverage is as accurate and responsible as possible. And why do we still care about the media in these days of social media and online stuff?
Well, the latest evidence still suggests that most people still get their information from what you would call traditional news sources. So newspapers, of course, that might not be the the Mail Online or the BBC, online TV and radio. So yes, blogs are great and things like social media are important. But we say ignore the mass media at your peril because that is still where most people get their information from,
particularly people who aren't seeking out science. So the ordinary members of the public who will in a way hear about science by accident because they're listening to the news or they're reading the newspaper. And we often say to scientists, if you don't speak to the media, then someone else will. We all know at the moment there's there's 24-7 news coverage, and journalists don't wait to hear from the world's number one top expert in a thing before they will cover a story.
They have to cover it, then that's the way breaking news in particular works, so they will cover it with or without you. So if you are an expert in this area, better that they hear from you. But the piece, the piece of news, and therefore everyone who reads that or hears it will benefit from your expertise as well as Crystal mentioned at the beginning, we always say that we'll help the media to do science better. When scientists do the media better, it's very much a two way thing.
Journalists aren't scientists. They can't be expected to get everything right without the help of experts, and the CMC is particularly concerned, in fact solely concerned with the accuracy and quality of media reporting. So unlike other press offices, we don't have in-house experts, we don't have our own scientists, we don't publish science. So we're not doing PR for a certain thing. We're not trying to get coverage for a certain thing.
We're just concerned with when the media are reporting about science that they do it in as accurate and as responsible a way possible. Not expecting you to read this. This is just to remind me to tell you how we are funded. So I said we're an independent organisation and we are we are funded loosely by the scientific community. So lots of universities, some industry, some government departments and learnt societies, the fund, the big science funders.
We've also got a couple of media funders in there. So the Daily Mail and the Times, now both funders as well. We cap donations at five percent of our annual income. So we maintain independence from all these places and nobody can tell us to do something. Ask us not to do something, check to us if we if we do something, we make all the editorial decisions ourselves about what stories we work on.
So these are the three groups of people we work with. We've got about three thousand scientists from across the UK. Mostly, they are university academics, also a few industry scientists. Research charity director of research sometimes thinks about twelve hundred press officers from all the institutes that we work with and then a bunch of journalists who are on our press lists.
The journals that we work with are the science, health and environment specialist correspondents at all the UK nationals. So in the UK, we've got obviously the broadsheets, the tabloids, broadcast channels, notebooks and news wires like PR Reuters, who feeds their Typekit into all the other outlets. And we're lucky in the UK that all of these places still has a science correspondent and health.
First of all, an environment correspondent, that's not the case in other countries, so we're really lucky to have those here. And we're often saying to scientists if any journalist is going to do a decent job of your research, especially the science correspondents. So just to go through the main things that we do at the on a day to day basis to try and achieve our aims of increasing the accuracy of evidence based media reporting.
So those three things are rapid reactions, round ups and press briefings. So first, a rapid reaction is what we do when there's a big breaking story. It won't surprise you that the one I'm going to talk to you about is this COVID 19. So we started working on this in mid-January when we were seeing headlines like these, which now seem slightly surreal, talking about a mystery illness in a few people in China.
And we're very media led at the assembly. So when this became a headline for media, that was when we started to work on this. And what we do is when there is a breaking story that journalists are covering or that they are interested in and they get in touch with us and ask us to help with is we go to our database of experts and find those with the relevant expertise and ask them to help.
So usually that is to give us a written comment that we can send out by email to the journalists on our press. So these are quotes they don't have to be short sound bite sentences. They can be quite sciencey paragraphs. We make no apology for the fact that we are here for the scientific community, and scientists are welcome to talk about science and evidence, and that's what we want them to do.
So we ask them to give us written quotes and then we sort of pump these out by email to journalists from all across the media. Journalists are welcome to use those as they wish so they can cut and paste them into their articles, which they often do. They can use them to to help inform their patients to help their understanding. And then they can get back to us and say, I've seen the comment from Professor Smith.
Can you put me in touch with her and I can ask some more questions about it? So that's what we did. The first day we worked on this was a Saturday in mid-January. This was when it was called. We had coronavirus, and so we went to our experts in the database and asked journalists, don't ask about this. Tell us about it. How concerned should we be? How worrying, high worrying is the situation? By the way, I'm not expecting you to read any of what I'm showing you.
These are just kind of I'm just sort of showing you pictures to show you snapshots of the kind of thing that we did. So these are the kinds of people that we send out comments from so far from the Wellcome Trust. Ashley McDermott, who is a scientist and clinician based at King's College London. Other experts in zoonotic diseases from from her bright people who are experts in global health and experts and immunology modelling experts like Michael Hasse,
Edinburgh. Virologists, people at my. So these people, all centres and more all centres comments on that Saturday about what we knew, what we didn't know, which was a lot, and we sent those out by email to journalists. And this is the kind of thing that we see later that day or the next day. So media articles using the quotes that we send out. So this is just an example of one in the mirror, and you can see where the quotes were used.
So quite quickly we realised this is this is a big story. We were getting dozens of calls every day. So within a couple of days of starting to work on this, we arranged our first press briefings, so physical press conference that we have in our normally in our offices in London. So this is just what the invitation looks like, that we send that to journalists. So we gathered a panel of four leading experts who could cover different topics.
So we had a model where we had an infectious disease expert, we had a global disease expert. We had someone can Wellcome. And the idea is that journalists are ringing us asking the same questions. Journalists are trying to get in touch with scientists to have their questions answered. Scientists are their phones are ringing off the hook, so let's get them all together in one room so that scientists can give their take on the situation.
Journalists can ask their questions. All the other journalists can benefit from the answers to their peers questions. So we had loads of journalists attend from across the kind of media spectrum. So broadcast, tabloid broadsheets, etc. This is what they look like. So these obviously this was before social distancing was a thing. And so the panellists on a chockablock room full of journalists and camera crews who wanted to hear about the science behind this.
And these are just some examples of where comments that were given in the briefing were used to inform the media articles, which which happens after that. So in the Times in the Express, again, just showing the across the board journalists who are trying to get this right and were really keen to hear from scientists, and then they were all on the news as well. And then within.
On the days and weeks that followed that briefing, the the comments that were made by the scientists at that briefing continue to inform the article. So quite a lot of the Mail Online articles, for example, had a little box or fact box, which they'd drawn up from the briefings. So it full of points from the briefing scientists.
And I think almost all the articles they wrote on on COVID after that have these boxes at the at the end, so continue to inform coverage, which is great for us because that's what we want. Is these scientists out there in the coverage informing it so that the public hearing from the experts. And then these are just a few examples of the early kind of developments which we gathered these rapid reaction comments to to send out to journalists by email.
So this was the first kind of inkling that asymptomatic spread might be a thing. So when that happened, we have questions from journalists. So we went back to our experts and said, Can you send us a comment about this? So these are the kinds of experts that we that we send out comments from. This is just what it looks like when journalists receive our emails and they're free to copy and paste these quotes, which they did.
So that's just one example in the Mail Online. That's that sort of sandbox thing I was mentioning. So that Blue Box at the end appeared in in scores of articles chock a block full of good scientists talking about evidence. So that's great. Then we had the first case, I think of onward transmission in a country outside of China. Again, we go back to the experts and say, Give us a comment on this. Everyone's asking about it.
Let's get some reliable information out there. And again, this gets used in the media. And then, of course, when we had our first two detected cases in England, that was that was a big one, and journalists were really keen to get expert comments. So again, we send we send out expert comments and they can use them as they wish and they get used in the media articles like this.
So the idea is that we keep pumping out evidence based quotes from good experts to so as to not to leave a void in the media. So some journalists are left without any experts that can help them so that the public can hear from good experts. Because this is such a big story, we kept doing briefings. We kept running these these press briefings with a sort of panel of experts who could answer all the questions that journalists might have.
So this one we ran a couple of weeks after the first one again, a really big turnout from across different types of media outlets, lots of camera crews again and then and then again. Another couple of weeks later, we ran a similar one. Crystal was on the panel for this one, and she was great, of course.
So and again, we wanted to have someone who could address modelling and stops someone who could talk about clinical science, someone who's could talk about virology, somebody to talk about global health, etc. And that was another busy one. And there you can see a crystal front and centre on the panel there. And these are just some of the examples of articles that came out of that briefing or that were informed from information that was given at that briefing. So that is what a rapid reaction is.
So it's written quotes that we send out from scientists to journalists, and they can use them, and it can be these sort of emergency press briefings. And these are just some examples of the other kinds of developments that we have said typewritten comments in response to over the last five months or so.
The kind of stats that come out daily from D.H or weekly from the Beyonce or the NHS Test and Trace programme when the government announced something big or bring in policy like lockdown, et cetera, stuff about face coverings two metres. Anything that's controversial and that there's a kind of either a perceived rather by or that there's confusion about schools.
Should they close, should they open some of the treatments that are coming through now, including the finally, thankfully some good news with dexamethasone the other day, something like vaccines when sage kind of dump the the evidence online, we get comments in response to that and also new new journal papers in preprints, which which of which there have been hundreds, of course, because of all the new science, which is which is being done on this and this.
I just thought I'd go through to illustrate one slightly unusual thing which we have now been doing for the last, I think, nine weeks. This was in the early days when the US first started publishing on Tuesdays their weekly their weekly stance on COVID 19 deaths in all settings. And so there'd been a couple of weeks of this, and each week we had gathered these written comments that we sent out.
And then Carl Hennigan from Oxford said, Should we do something on this because you're getting lots called, let's suppose we're all trying to control the journalists questions. Should we do a sort of online briefing? So we said, of course, that's a great idea. Let's let's do it. So every Tuesday, since since mid-April, we have got this excellent group of experts the David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge and Carl Henning, an adjacent bloke from Oxford.
And this is a sort of lunchtime briefing. So in the morning, when the stats come out, these scientists spend the morning analysing the stats, putting together their own graphs, working out what they think the stats show. And then 1:30 or 1:15, we do an online briefing via Zoom, and these experts present their view of what the owner's data is showing and journalists get to ask their questions there. They've been well attended, and this is just one example. So this was the.
One loads of coverage, of course, was happening anyway, because the onus had released the stats, but these were the kinds of headlines that were informed by what the scientist said in the briefing, including that they were talking about. It looks like the peak in hospitals. At least five deaths had happened in early April. And that's just to show where some of the comments from the briefing were used. And then the second week that we did this again, lots of journalists came along.
Lots of articles informed by the comments they made in the briefing, including the sort of worry about deaths in care homes. So that's just one example of the briefings that we've done, I think we've done over 40 briefings since January on this. Obviously since lockdown, we've been doing them remotely on Zoom, which we're very sceptical about at first. We like having press briefings in person, whereas scientists and journalists, you know, meet each other and see the lines of each other's eyes.
And great things happen when when that happens, but reluctantly have to admit that the Zoom briefings have worked well and have been popular. And we're really grateful that we're able to do them because we wouldn't have been able to do anything from the total without them. These are just some of the other examples of stories that we've done briefings on on COVID. So stuff about are are we going to have a second wave? How does testing work?
What's the virus test? What's the antibody test? What about the app and contact tracing? What about children's susceptibility and transmission and disease severity? And should schools be open? We've run a couple actually with Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance as well when they can explain to the science journalists rather than the political hacks who get who tend to attend the Downing Street briefings. What is SAGE? How does it work? How does evidence based policy work?
How does scientific evidence to government work? So those are just some of the examples. So that is that's covert. That is what we've been doing almost exclusively for the last five months that we have done similar things on other big stories, including swine flu and Ebola and Zika. Years ago, Novichok a couple of years ago now cases like Charlie Garden, Alfie Evans, when they were big in the news at Fukushima, as Crystal mentioned at the beginning, but none has been as big as it has been.
So I'll just spend a couple of minutes before we sort through questions describing what we also do in kind of peacetime when we're not in the situation. So our main bread and butter really is what we call the roundup. And that's what we do when there's a new piece of science that's coming out again in normal times. This happens through peer reviewed journal publication, of course.
So normally we thought there's an embargo period, which means the journal or a university will send out a press release to journalists. And then there and then that information is under embargo for 24 hours. For example, that embargo period gives the journalists time to do whatever research they need to do. Speak to some other experts. Put their act together before everyone publishes it at the same time. And actually, most stories that you read in the news in normal times come come from this.
So they will come from the press release, from a journal or from a university or a research college or something like that. And the science and health journals will usually write five to 10 stories today, even even when it's not COVID times. So we get the press releases from these journals.
We try and identify stories that are remnants of the kind of controversial topics I was talking about earlier, or if we see a story that we think that's going to get media coverage and it might be misinterpreted or that could be scary, we should find out from scientists if if it's warranted, that it's scary or if they can help put it into context. So I've just picked a random one from a few years ago. This was a paper in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine about e-cigarettes and smoking cessation.
E-cigs obviously have been hugely controversial, so that takes the box of an assembly topic. This press release was saying e-cigarettes aren't helping smokers quit. We knew that was controversial. We knew from chats with scientists that that perhaps wasn't what all the evidence was showing. So we got in touch with experts and said, Please, can you read this paper and send us a written comment that we can send out to journalists to help them with their reporting?
So these are the kinds of things that we send out to read is just my highlighting to pick out some studies to mention to you. So here's an expert saying I think it's a failure of the peer review system that this has been published at all.
You know someone else saying that the conclusions are at best tentative and at worst incorrect, and that it was a some sort of systematic review and that the observational studies that were looked up in this review were not very good themselves and other people saying that this is really misleading and not not the conclusions weren't backed up by the evidence and the science is there on McNeil at the bottom,
who she'd actually authored some of the studies that this review looks at and just pointing out they haven't, they haven't interpreted our results correctly. So very strong quotes. That's absolutely fine with us. We want scientists to be honest and frank. We send these to journalists and this has been widely press release and there was only three articles in the U.K. media and in this guardian one, the word contested is in the headline, and that's from the comments that we sent out.
Also in the mail, they covered it, but again, they use the quotes that we send. So adding that context and as did the Sun. So if you read any of these pieces to the bottom, you would know that U.K. scientists didn't agree with this and they thought it wasn't accurate.
And this was a nice comment that we had from one of the journalists on our list who said, thanks to the scientists who commented on this, I'm not going to cover it or I'm not going to cover it as prominently as I was going to because I realised that the scientific community doesn't think that it stacks up. So that's good for us. That's we for us because we care about accurate coverage. If it would be misleading for something to get lots of coverage, then no coverage is obviously.
Is this just a quick word? Another thing which is called before the headlines, this was this is something that we decided to do on some of the more stats heavy papers that we're getting round of quotes on, which is when we ask a bank and volunteer statisticians to give a quick, a quick, quick and dirty stats analysis of the paper and whether it stacks up again.
I'm not expecting to read this. This is just to show you what it looks like, so it's kind of a format they have to answer specific questions like are the claims supported by the data? Do the stocks, the stats stack up? What are the strengths and limitations? So for example, whoever put this one together says strength, it was large limitation that no correction was made for carrying out three different significance tests. So these aren't really designed to be quoted by journalists. But.
Hopefully, a helpful quick digest of whether the study has been done well and whether its stats are kind of methodologically sound. I would think for time. So very quickly, I'll just show a couple of non-COVID briefings just to illustrate what we do normally. So two main types of briefings a news briefing when scientists are publishing data, a new general paper or a background briefing, which is the sort of evidence check on a hot topic.
The reasons for doing these is that scientists get to talk on their own terms, present their work to journalists in their own words. And journalists get to come and get a story and ask questions of scientists. We do these again, particularly on the kind of controversial topics when briefings can be really good at kind of nipping in the bud, any misconceptions and heading off at the pass, any kind of misinterpretations or inaccuracies that might otherwise be in the media articles.
So this was a paper in nature with data from Kathy Neo-Con Crick, who had done the first experiments using genome editing in human embryos, so she was presenting her sheet. You have this paper coming out and of course, with with genome editing, we've heard about the slippery slope to designer babies, and she was concerned that people would get the wrong idea about what she was actually doing and why she why she wanted to do it.
So we said we'll come and speak to journalists and tell them, tell them what it is that you're doing. So we did, and lots of journalists came along and these were the kind of headlines that resulted.
So gene that could stop IVF from failing is find similarly in the Guardian and the Telegraph master gene to create a successful pregnancy discovered in the Mirror as well and the times of the Sun. So no sign of designer babies in the headlines and on the articles were full of really science information and really accurate. So that just shows again the benefit of scientists proactively engaging with the media to help them report things accurately from the off.
And then finally, a background briefing is if we see a topic that's kind of covered chronically in the media and we think, Oh, I wonder if that's accurate. So we saw lots of articles about the dangers of screen time, particularly for young children. So we got in touch with experts and said, Is that right? Is that accurate? Are you happy with that? And several of them said, No, it's not that simple. Have the evidence, just isn't there.
And so we again said, Right, come in to see the journals and talk to them about what we what we do and we don't know from the evidence. So that's what we did. And these were the kind of headline. Again, these briefings aren't designed to generate coverage, but rather to try and inform the journalists. So the next time they're probing the topic, they have a kind of better grounding in it. But it's all on record. So if they if the briefings do generate coverage, that's fine with us.
So with that, one of these was some of the headlines we had. So screen time harmed children is unproven. WTO gaming disorder is moral panic. Is screen time actually bad for you? Probably not. So that's just an example of what we do in peacetime. These are just some headlines to remind me to emphasise that we don't just do COVID, although we do at the moment, but we do anything that's controversial, messy, politicised, the kind of big science stories of the day.
So we don't do. We don't tend to work on much good news or kind of things like SpaceX and dinosaurs and that kind of thing. Not that they're not interesting, but lots of other organisations work on them. So we are here, particularly for the difficult, contested issues to which I think arguably is when we need to hear from scientists the most, when the public need to know what the evidence is and isn't. And and we also do do some slightly other things.
So every once a year, we arrange for a statistician to come in and spend a couple of hours with the journalists to try to help them get to grips with the science. And we were amazed when we first started doing this about how well-attended they are. And I think again, that just goes to show how much the science and health journalists really care about this. Really want to understand science and science, really want to report it well.
So we've got we had David Spiegelhalter the last time we've had Kevin McCormick from the university before. And this is just to show us that that's a roomful of journalists giving up two hours of their day not to get a story. They're not going to get story about, but to learn about stats and to ask all their questions about stuff. So I think that's again, just to champion the the specialist journalists that they do try and report things well.
And those are just some stats on what we've done on COVID. Ignore the June bar that date night, but just to show that our our workload has increased massively. That's not because we don't care about our workload, but that's to show that the appetite in the media. I don't need to tell you you'll you'll see this on the TV. You know that this is everywhere. So normally we do about 300 round up. So those are the quotes on new papers a year and about 60 or 70 briefings a year.
But we can own the journey of it with the help of scientists and. Next for us, and that's why we love our database of scientists so much, and if any of you are interested in getting involved, then that would be great. So please do get in touch with me and we'd be very happy to to to help, to help you speak to journalists as well.