2024
Flu vs COVID: Stark Disparity in Vaccination and Deaths
Published in Medscape, May 2, 2024
Another COVID Booster Versus Your Annual Flu Shot
Email from Peter M. Sandman to freelance medical writer Sara Novak, April 23, 2024
On April 22, 2024, freelance medical writer Sara Novak emailed me to request an interview for “a story for Medscape on the flu and COVID and why the perspective is different on vaccination even though it’s deadlier.” I suggested she send me a few questions that I could answer in writing, which she did. Her questions focused on why patients who get their flu shots routinely are less compliant about COVID boosters, and on how I thought doctors could best persuade them to get the boosters. She used a few quotes from my April 23 answers in her May 2 article.
Sara Novak's article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman's email to Sarah Novak is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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What Goes Into an Expert’s Expert Judgment Other Than That Expert’s Expertise (with COVID examples)
Panel presentation (via Zoom) at a conference on “COVID and the Academy: What Have We Learned?” Heterodox Academy Research Symposium, Stanford, California, February 23, 2024
The Heterodox Academy (HxA) has the important mission of fostering respectful debate that includes people with unpopular opinions, especially in academia. So I was delighted and flattered when an HxA official invited me to speak at a February 23, 2024 day-long conference on “COVID and the Academy: What Have We Learned?” I couldn’t make it to the conference venue at Stanford University, but we agreed that I would speak via Zoom, one of three participants in a panel of social scientists. My title was “What Goes Into an Expert ’s Expert Judgment Other Than That Expert’s Expertise.” I covered eight points, all points I have written about before (especially here), but not all in the same place and not illustrated with COVID examples. Since I was assigned only 20 minutes (and graciously granted 31), the speech was sketchy, especially toward the end – so I am also posting my much-less-sketchy notes for the hour-long speech I wished I could give.
Link to the offsite video of the presentation on YouTube (with a machine transcript) (31 min.)
Link launches an on-site audio file of the presentation (44MB, 31 min.)
Link launches an on-site file with the presentation PowerPoint slides (95kB) 
Link to my much more extensive “notes” for the longer presentation I couldn’t give -
Email from Peter M. Sandman to freelance medical writer Lisa Rapaport, February 2, 2024
On February 1, 2024, freelance medical writer Lisa Rapaport emailed me with four questions for a story she said she was writing for WebMD, “focused on current trends in deaths and vaccinations for COVID versus flu.” All four of her questions were about COVID; two of the four were about COVID vaccination (COVID boosters, really); two had an explicit comparison to flu. I answered three of the four the next day. (One was outside my expertise.) That was more than a month ago, so I figure the story never got published, maybe never got written. Rather than see my effort go for naught, I’m posting the Q&A here.
This Q&A email is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Why I Hope the COVID Pandemic Isn’t Over
Posted on MedPage Today as a “Second Opinion,” January 24, 2024
News stories and opinion pieces about COVID-19 rarely call it a pandemic anymore, except in the past tense. The ever more popular claim that the pandemic is over is routinely deployed as a reason not to take precautions, while the dwindling minority who disagree are dissed as doomsayers. I think this gets things exactly backwards. COVID is still killing more people than flu. If the pandemic is over, the current death rate is the new normal – whereas if the pandemic isn’t over yet, we have grounds to hope that the COVID death rate will keep dwindling before a better new normal materializes. It’s a pretty minor point, but it bothered me. So one morning I sat down to write an op-ed about it, which MedPage Today was happy to post.
This Peter M. Sandman article is located both on this site and off this site.
This article is categorized as:
The YouTube file is located off this site.
The other three files are located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
2023
Let’s Stop Insulting Each Other as ‘Anti-Science’
Published in Bloomberg, October 22, 2023
Public Health Lost the Public’s Trust, Especially on the Right – and Blames “Anti-Science”
Composite of two emails from Peter M. Sandman to Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faye Flam, October 10 and October 12, 2023
As the pandemic emergency subsided, I returned to near-retirement; I haven’t posted anything specifically on COVID since late December 2022. But on October 10, 2023, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faye Flam (who now writes as “F.D. Flam”) decided to write a column about a new book by vaccine scientist Peter Hotez entitled The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning. She asked for my opinion. I hadn’t read the book, but I had read enough of Peter Hotez’s views on the topic to respond. I answered in two emails, focusing on how public health’s COVID policies undermined public trust – especially on the right; and how self-defeating it was for the public health profession to blame “anti-science” instead of assessing its own errors. Faye’s October 22 column made some use of both emails. I am posting a lightly edited composite of the two.
Faye Flam’s article is located off this site.
A composite of Peter M. Sandman’s two emails to Faye Flam is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Looking Back: Tracing How I Got to My Approach to Risk Communication
Interview via Zoom with Margaret Harvie and Lewis Michaelson, April 27, 2023
In early March 2023, Australian friend and colleague Margaret Harvie asked me to sit for a Zoom interview on the history of my approach to risk communication. She said she and Lewis Michaelson were doing a series of such interviews for the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) with “creators of some of the IAP2 products,” focusing on “what was happening at the time that led to [their] thinking.” The result was a 66-minute three-way April 27 interview, a chance for me to talk my way through how I got into risk communication, how I came up with “Hazard versus Outrage,” how I think outrage management relates to public participation, and related topics. I also spent some time at the end outlining some of the ways risk communication can be subdivided: precaution advocacy versus outrage management versus crisis communication versus “the sweet spot”; education versus persuasion; stakeholder relations versus public relations versus government relations etc.; and support mobilization versus public relations versus outrage management.
Link to the offsite Zoom file on Vimeo (66 min.) Link launches an on-site audio file (90MB, 66 min.)
Link to an off-site page with a 20-minute video edit (and interviews with other IAP2 “pioneers”) The Zoom video file is located off this site.
The audio file is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
2022
Risk and Crisis Communications
Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (73MB, 52 min.)Interview with Peter M. Sandman, via Zoom audio, by Eric Holdeman, December 9, 2022
I’ve known emergency management expert Eric Holdeman for decades, ever since I did some risk communication training for him when he was emergency management director for King County (Seattle). On December 9, 2022, he interviewed me via Zoom for his “Disaster Zone” podcast; he posted the interview on December 20. Our 52-minute conversation was all over the map. I explained the hazard-versus-outrage distinction, but never got very far into the high-hazard, high-outrage corner of that 2x2 matrix (crisis communication, Eric’s corner). We did spend some time talking about the Three Mile Island accident, arguably high-hazard and certainly high-outrage. But we focused more on the principles and strategies of outrage management (low-hazard, high outrage) – so that’s where I’m indexing the interview. We also talked about how I got into risk communication in the first place, what went wrong in U.S. COVID risk communication, what I think about Tony Fauci … basically whatever came to mind.
This audio interview is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
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Ron DeSantis Vaccine Complaint Exploits Public Health Gaffes
Published in Bloomberg, December 17, 2022
Reassess How Public Health Oversold COVID Vaccination – But Not the DeSantis Way
On December 15, 2022, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Faye Flam emailed me for my views on “this recent move by [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis to investigate the mRNA vaccines via grand jury.” I wrote back that I thought COVID vaccines had been oversold in ways that undermined trust, and I would welcome a neutral or pro-vax investigation of this COVID vaccination dishonesty – but the investigation DeSantis was proposing looked one-sidedly antivax and far from the needed corrective. Faye's follow-up email suggested that in some ways COVID vaccination had been undersold. In my second response I addressed that, and elaborated on public health’s inadequate guidance about who should consider not getting an mRNA COVID shot. Faye’s column made only a little use of my two emails.
Faye Flam's article is located off this site.
A composite of Peter M. Sandman's two emails to Faye Flam is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Communicating about Mass Casualty Events
Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (77MB, 55:35 min.)Interview with Peter M. Sandman, via Zoom audio, by Olivia Truban, December 1, 2022
In October 2022 I got an email from Olivia Truban, a University of Maryland Ph.D. student, asking to interview me for her research on how to “ethically communicate about mass casualty events,” especially mass shootings. I started our December 1, 56-minute conversation with the basics of the hazard-versus-outrage distinction, making my case that mass casualty events obviously call for crisis communication vis-à-vis those at risk, but also require precaution advocacy (for those who might face the risk someday) and outrage management (for those who are excessively upset now). We went on to focus mostly on the outrage management challenge when bystanders are excessively frightened or miserable. We talked about how natural and morally neutral risks arouse less outrage than when evil people do evil things; then about two ways to respond to excessive outrage (validate people’s outrage and offer them things to do). At the end of the interview Olivia asked me about the ethics of consulting with dishonest clients, then about why authorities should show their feelings rather than staying “professional.”
This audio interview is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Major US cities report new monkeypox cases
CIDRAP News, June 3, 2022
Avoiding Stigmatization Shouldn’t Be the Top Priority in Monkeypox Risk Communication
Two emails from Peter M. Sandman to Stephanie Soucheray of CIDRAP News, June 2 and June 3, 2022
On June 2, 2022, CIDRAP News reporter Stephanie Soucheray emailed me for my views on monkeypox risk communication, “specifically the challenges public health officials may have in messaging around this risk to the MSM/gay community.” My answer later that day included some of my other thoughts on how monkeypox risk was getting communicated, especially re overconfidence and over-optimism. In a follow-up, Stephanie asked me what I thought about “Interim advice on Risk Communication and Community Engagement during the monkeypox outbreak in Europe, 2022”
during the monkeypox outbreak in Europe, 2022, a just-published joint report of the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. So I sent her a list of my reactions to that report. Her June 3 article on the day’s monkeypox developments included some points from my emails.Stephanie Soucheray’s article is located off this site.
A composite of Peter M. Sandman’s two emails to Stephanie Soucheray is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne
Published in Nature (vol. 604, pp. 26-31) and posted on the Nature website, April 6, 2022
Email from Peter M. Sandman to journalist Dyani Lewis, August 5, 2021
On August 2, 2021, I got an email from journalist Dyani Lewis about an article she was writing for Nature. “The WHO has been criticized,” she wrote, “for being slow to acknowledge aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in non-healthcare settings, and now that they have changed their stance, for not adequately communicating that to the public.” Referencing some of my earlier writing about WHO communications regarding SARS and swine flu, she wanted to know what I thought about “the way that the WHO handled the uncertainty regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” My August 5 email in response discussed five reasons why WHO might have hesitated to acknowledge aerosol (airborne) transmission. My email also mentioned my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, so Dyani later interviewed Jody by phone. Her extensive article, “Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne” was finally published on April 6, 2022. It had a lot of sources, including my email and Jody’s interview. I have made a few clarifying edits in the email, but it’s basically what I sent Dyani in August 2021.
Dyani Lewis’s article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Dyani Lewis is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Two Messaging Suggestions: “Let’s Enjoy the Lull” and “We’re Not All in the Same Pandemic”
Amalgam of two emails from Peter M. Sandman to Vox politics reporter Li Zhou, February 7, 2022
On February 7 Vox politics reporter Li Zhou emailed me to ask if I had any suggestions vis-à-vis “Democrats’ current messaging about the pandemic.” Dozens of suggestions came to mind. I picked two for a quick response: “Let’s enjoy the lull” and “We’re not all in the same pandemic.” Li asked two follow-up questions, leading me to expand on my thinking. When her article appeared a few days later, I wasn’t in it. This amalgam combines my two emails (and leaves out some of the second email that I decided I didn’t like).
This file is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
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Posted on the Daily Mail website, February 7, 2022, with a February 8 update
Wearing an Unnecessary Mask Outdoors Isn’t a Big Deal Even If You’re President
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Daily Mail editor Wills Robinson, February 7, 2022
The Daily Mail is a British right-leaning tabloid newspaper. It has run several articles critical of President Biden for wearing a mask against COVID under conditions when no mask was required or needed – e.g. outdoors and uncrowded. On February 7 one of its New York editors, Wills Robinson, emailed me that the paper was about to run another such article, and invited me to comment. My response explained why I thought Biden wearing an unnecessary mask was no big deal. The story appeared without my comments. On February 8 I sent Wills a slightly snarky email that apparently mine was the wrong viewpoint for the Daily Mail. At his instigation a February 8 updated story included much of what I had written.
Rachael Bunyan’s article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Wills Robinson is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
CDC leader faces precarious political moment
by Nathaniel Weixel, posted on The Hill website, January 10, 2022
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Nathaniel Weixel, healthcare reporter for The Hill, January 10, 2022
Early January 2022 saw a spate of news stories on the pandemic messaging missteps of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On January 10, I received an email from Nathaniel Weixel, a healthcare reporter for The Hill, asking for comment specifically on the January 7 news conference of CDC head Rochelle Walensky, her first solo “presser” (not part of a White House event) since summer 2021. I had written before on how best to resuscitate CDC’s reputation. This time I focused on urging CDC to set itself up once again as the agency most willing to explain scientific and policy complexities to reporters, however long it takes, however hostile or ignorant or repetitive the questions might be. And I emphasized that rebuilding trust requires acknowledging prior screw-ups. Being candid, apologetic, and detailed is a more trust-building strategy for CDC than always working to sell its bottom-line recommendations with “misoversimplified” rationales. As usual, Nathaniel used only a couple of paragraphs from my response.
Nathaniel Weixel's article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman's email to Nathaniel Weixel is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
2021
Cut Slack for Employees’ Excessive COVID Fears (or Vaccination Fears)
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Bloomberg Opinion science columnist Faye Flam, September 30, 2021
On September 29, Bloomberg Opinion science columnist Faye Flam emailed me about an angry September 23 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Written by University of Michigan Professor Silke-Maria Weineck, the article (entitled “The Dystopian Delta University”) criticized her university for forcing obviously COVID-vulnerable professors to return to the classroom. Faye wanted to know what I thought. My response focused on employers’ dilemma when their employees were more fearful than vulnerable. I pointed out that employees who are excessively afraid of returning to their workplace are not so different from employees who are excessively afraid of getting vaccinated. Relying on the concepts of cognitive dissonance and adjustment reactions, I argued that coercion is likely to backfire in both cases. As of October 7, Faye is still working on an article that may or may not end up based in part on my email.
Peter M. Sandman's email to Faye Flam is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Confidence, complacency, and convenience: part two
Posted on her blog, "The Turnstone," September 12, 2021
COVID Vaccination and Cognitive Dissonance
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Melanie Newfield and posted as a comment on her blog post, September 12, 2021
Melanie Newfield is a weed expert (and therefore a pesticide expert) who worked for the New Zealand government for many years, where she found my approach to outrage management useful in dealing with public pesticide fears. Now a self-employed consultant, she writes a blog called “The Turnstone” that periodically cites my work. Recently she has been writing a lot about COVID-19, including a series of posts about how to talk to vaccine-hesitant people. Her September 12, 2021 post entitled “Confidence, complacency, and convenience: part two” dealt with vaccination incentives (like money) and disincentives (like losing your job). It got me thinking about Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance – especially whether too big an incentive or disincentive might “succeed” in getting people vaccinated while totally failing to get them any less committed to their reasons for hesitating. Melanie posted my response. I decided to post it too.
Melanie Newfield’s blog post is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Melanie Newfield is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Analysis: White House dominance of pandemic message might feed political divides
Posted on the CNN website, July 30, 2021
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Email from Peter M. Sandman to Maggie Fox, July 20, 2021
Maggie Fox of CNN has sought my views before on how best to resuscitate the reputation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She asked again in a July 19 email, focusing this time on whether it would help for the CDC and other federal agencies to show more independence from the White House. I responded the next day, agreeing that agency independence from the White House was as important – and as evidently lacking – under Biden as it had been under Trump. I added that I didn’t really want to see federal agencies seek or get a reputation for always being right, but rather a reputation for knowing they’re not always right and being open to a wide range of expert opinions. Maggie’s excellent July 30 article used some of what I had to say about agency independence, though not about opinion diversity.
Maggie Fox’s CNN article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Maggie Fox is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Is Covid19 still a threat in a post-vaccinated world?
Video discussion on Bloomberg Quicktake, posted via Twitter, June 2, 2021
‘Covid Zero’ Risks Being ‘Covid Limbo’ Amid Slow Vaccine Uptake
Posted on Bloomberg News, June 3, 2021
Despite its misleading title, this 33-minute video discussion on Bloomberg Quicktake had almost nothing to do with a post-vaccinated world. The Bloomberg News article about the discussion summarized it properly: It was mostly about the pre-vaccinated world of "COVID-Zero" places like Australia and Hong Kong. These are places that have kept COVID-19 out pretty successfully, and now they’re having trouble vaccinating their citizens so they can open up again to travel, tourism, etc. The risk communication perspective was (over)represented in the discussion by both me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. The third interviewee was Australian epidemiologist Greg Dore. We all basically agreed that COVID-Zero countries can’t turn themselves into 21st century Hermit Kingdoms, but we had somewhat different perspectives on who should decide when, how, and how much to open up.
Link launches an onsite audio MP3 file of the discussion (45.4 MB, 33 min.).The Bloomberg article summarizing the discussion is located off this site.The Twitter post with the video of the discussion is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
As it fights a pandemic, CDC wages a second battle to win back trust
Posted on the CNN website, May 21, 2021
CDC’s Reputation Takes Another Hit When Walensky Says Vaccinated People Can Take Off Their Masks
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Maggie Fox, May 20, 2021
On May 19, 2021, Maggie Fox of CNN emailed me that she was picking up a topic we had corresponded about months earlier: how best to resuscitate the reputation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Now that she was finally going to write the article, she wanted to know if I had any new thoughts. Aside from summarizing and quoting our earlier correspondence, my May 20 response focused on CDC’s May 13 announcement that vaccinated people could safely remove their masks and stop social distancing – an announcement that was widely criticized and indisputably did CDC further reputational damage. Though she did mention the May 13 announcement, Maggie’s May 21 article focused more on CDC earlier COVID-19 reputation debacles, and on CDC’s failure to resume its customary role as the nation’s premier source of information about infectious disease outbreaks. Maggie quoted me several times on those topics, but not on the May 13 announcement.
Maggie Fox’s CNN article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Maggie Fox is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Dr Norman Swan explains the risks versus the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine
Posted on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) website and broadcast on the ABC television program “7:30,” May 5, 2021
Having posted a website comment on “COVID-19 Vaccine Blood Clots: Secrecy versus Pause versus Informed Consent,” I wasn’t too surprised to get an email from a producer of “7:30,” Australia’s leading nightly public affairs program, asking if their medical expert Dr. Norman Swan could interview me on the controversy – and on the risk communication challenge of convincing people not to overreact to tiny but scary risks. In our half-hour conversation, I emphasized that while the blood clot risk of some COVID-19 vaccines was indeed tiny, in Australia the risk of COVID-19 itself was also pretty small. So unlike Americans and Europeans, I said, most Australians could afford the luxury of waiting for a vaccine that scared them less to become available. ABC wouldn’t let me post the interview, but I did get permission to post the five-minute segment. There’s also a transcript of the segment on the ABC website.
The MP4 of the ABC segment including Dr. Norman Swan's
interview with Peter M. Sandman is located on this site.
A transcript of the segment is located off this site.This article is categorized as:
A COVID ‘second wave’ that never crashed. Should public health mislead if it saves lives in a pandemic?
Posted on the WHYY (Philadelphia) website, April 30, 2021 (and broadcast on various NPR stations at various times in the days that followed)
On March 8, 2021, Jad Sleiman of WHYY radio in Philadelphia interviewed me by telephone about the ways in which public health professionals “gild the lily” (my phrase, not his), saying things that aren’t strictly true when they believe doing so will help make public health messaging more persuasive and thereby save lives. We talked for an hour and 44 minutes, covering both COVID-19 examples and others from earlier in my career. On March 23 I posted the audio of the complete interview, divided into segments to make for easier listening, as well as an email I had sent to Jad before the interview. Descriptions and links for the original interview and pre-interview email are here.
On April 30, nearly two months after that March 8 interview, Jad finally used it. He posted two versions of his story: a 26-minute podcast and radio program (part of a WHYY series called “The Pulse” for National Public Radio) and a print article on the WHYY website. The two are very similar – and in my judgment, very well done. (Jad’s other source for the piece is Holley Wilkin, a health communications professor at Georgia State University.) Because I like what he produced so much, I didn’t want to bury it – so I decided to write this separate entry in my various indexes, rather than just attaching the new links to my March 23 entry.
Link launches the onsite audio file of Jad Sleiman’s podcast (12MB, 26:20 min.)Link to the off-site article Link to my March 23 website entry with descriptions and links for the original March 8 interview (divided into segments) and pre-interview emailThe MP3 of the podcast and radio program based largely on Jad Sleiman’s
interview with Peter M. Sandman is located on this site.
Jad Sleiman’s article covering the same ground is located off this site.
The descriptions and links for the March 8 interview and
pre-interview email are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Resuscitating CDC’s Reputation
Between January 18 and March 16, 2021, Maggie Fox of CNN exchanged a series of emails with me (and initially also my wife and colleague Jody Lanard) regarding an article Maggie was planning to write about how best to resuscitate the reputation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Maggie may eventually write the article, and may use some of what Jody and I sent her. We may also exchange additional emails about CDC’s continuing reputational problems. (As I write this blurb on April 1, I’m thinking about CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s March 29 inexplicable worries about COVID-19 “impending doom,” coming on top of her agency's excessively precautionary recommendations on what vaccinees can safely do.) In the meantime, I have collated excerpts from our emails. The main point: People who have been paying attention know that CDC has been responsible for serious errors and misjudgments that cannot be blamed on Donald Trump. To resuscitate its reputation with those people, CDC must first take responsibility.
The email excerpts are located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Reopening as Covid-19 Fades Is Not a Science
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, March 24, 2021
Amalgam of two emails from Peter M. Sandman to Faye Flam, March 22, 2021
Bloomberg News columnist Faye Flam emailed me on March 22 for a piece she was writing about “how and why we need to balance ‘the science’ with people’s need to resume normal life.” I responded that same day with two emails, which I have merged here into one. I argued that the experts’ excessive caution “is much less grounded in ‘the science’ than they would have us believe.” And then I laid out what I consider four bad outcomes of that excessive caution – bad outcomes regardless of whether people bow to the experts’ opinions, try to bow to those opinions but fail, or decide those opinions are obviously crazy and look elsewhere for guidance. Faye made some use of my email in her March 24 column. (She also drew on a March 3 interview I’ve posted separately.)
Faye Flam's Bloomberg Opinion column is located off this site.
The amalgam of Peter M. Sandman's two emails to Faye Flam is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Public Health Messaging that Aims to Persuade the Audience at the Expense of Truth: Some Examples from COVID-19 and Earlier
Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Jad Sleiman, March 8, 2021
(and a March 2 email from Peter M. Sandman to Jad Sleiman)On March 2, journalist Jad Sleiman sent me a very thoughtful email about “a question I’ve been wrestling with all pandemic: Should public health messaging be objective (telling the public the most precise version of reality according to their best data) or should public health messaging be persuasive (telling the public what is most likely to persuade them to adopt a given life-saving behavior)?” It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for decades. My emailed response that same day went into some detail on my thinking, with several pre-COVID examples of the conflict between truth-telling and health-selling. It resulted in a one-hour and 44-minute March 8 interview, covering both COVID and pre-COVID examples. A reporter for WHYY radio in Philadelphia, Jad used the interview for both an April 30 episode of “The Pulse” (a WHYY podcast series and National Public Radio program) and an April 30 article on the WHYY website. Jad's podcast/radio show and article are described and linked here. Below are links to my email to Jad and the interview itself.
For those who don’t want to listen to the whole hour and 44 minutes, I have divided the audio tape into 9 segments. The titles are linked below – or see the same links with segment descriptions on the Media page.
These links launch MP3 audio files:
- Some risk communication basics and history (9.6MB, 6:52 min.)
- Gilding the lily – principles (19MB, 13:36 min.)
- Two pandemics – swine flu versus COVID-19 (11.5MB, 8:12 min.)
- Gilding the lily – pre-COVID examples (24.2MB, 17:11 min.)
- Gilding the lily – selling COVID-19 precautions (13.3MB, 9:26 min.)
- The communicative accuracy principle and the facemask example (21.8MB, 15:33 min.)
- Gilding the lily – COVID-19 vaccination (15.4MB, 10:54 min.)
- Gilding the lily – three more examples (16.6MB, 11:47 min.)
- The public’s trust in science; scientists’ trust in the public (18MB, 12:49 min.)
The text of Peter M. Sandman’s email to Jad Sleiman is located on this site.
The MP3s of the whole interview and interview segments are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
My Top Gripes (some longstanding, some current and fleeting) about How Public Health Professionals Are Communicating COVID-19 Risk
Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Faye Flam, March 3, 2021
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Faye Flam of Bloomberg News has periodically checked in with me by email or phone. I posted the audio of our hour-long February 9 (2020) interview, which was mostly about the need to sound the alarm more aggressively; and our 1-1/2–hour July 23 (2020) interview, which was largely about lockdown versus “learning to dance with the virus.”
This time we talked for nearly two hours and covered a lot of ground, under the general heading of “my top gripes about how public health professionals are communicating COVID-19 risk.” The uniting theme insofar as there was one: the many ways experts and officials cherry-pick what to say based less on the truth as they understand it than on other factors: sometimes what they think will most effectively convince the public to do what they think best; sometimes their anger at what other experts and officials are saying; sometimes their values and political opinions; etc.
For those who don't want to listen to the whole 115 minutes, I have divided the audio tape into 11 segments. The titles are linked below – or see the same links with segment descriptions on the Media page.
Faye has a podcast series entitled “Follow the Science.” On March 12 she posted #13 in the series, “When Public Health Officials Lie,” based entirely on the second and third segments of our March 3 interview. I think she covered this material spectacularly well. On March 19 she posted #14, “When Trust in Experts Goes Too Far.” The second half of this podcast is an effort to tie together bits and pieces from the rest of the interview.
These links launch MP3 audio files:
- Claiming all COVID-19 vaccines are equally good (8MB, 5:40 min.)
- Selling health versus telling the truth (23MB, 16:13 min.)
- The bias in favor of pessimistic messaging (9MB, 6:22 min.)
- Science versus values (8.3MB, 6 min.)
- Harm reduction versus aiming for zero risk (12MB, 8:34 min.)
- What we get instead of respectful, tentative debate (23MB, 16:29 min.)
- Could we have crushed the virus? (9.9MB, 7:04 min.)
- Selling COVID-19 vaccination to Trump supporters (10MB, 7:12 min.)
- Resuscitating CDC’s reputation (19MB, 13:49 min.)
- Health versus equity in vaccine prioritization (16MB, 11:31 min.)
- Standard Operating Procedure in an emergency (22MB, 15:39 min.)
The MP3s of the whole interview and the interview segments are located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Can the arrival of new coronavirus variants scare Americans into better pandemic behavior?
Posted on the CNN website, January 30, 2021
Any Chance of Getting Anybody to Take the New COVID-19 Variants Seriously?
Seven points sent to CNN reporter Maggie Fox, January 29, 2021
On January 29, CNN health reporter Maggie Fox emailed me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, asking for a quick comment or two (on a tight deadline) on what it might take “to get people to do the things they need to do right now to prevent a new [COVID-19] surge driven by the new variants.” Jody was busy, so I responded alone with a numbered list of points, which were pretty pessimistic – not just about getting the public to respond as needed, but also about getting government agencies (especially the Food and Drug Administration) to respond as needed. Hence the title I have given what I wrote to Maggie. Maggie’s resulting story was pretty pessimistic too, even though she emphasized the least pessimistic portions of my emails.
Maggie Fox’s CNN article is located off this site.
The comment list Peter M. Sandman wrote to Maggie Fox is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
2020
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Posted on the Business Insider website, December 28, 2020
COVID-19 Vaccination Messaging
Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (50.4MB, 1 hr. 13 min.)Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Kimberly Leonard, December 22, 2020
Business Insider reporter Kimberly Leonard emailed me on December 17 to ask for an interview. She was planning an article on how the Biden team might do better with COVID-19 in 2021 than his predecessor did in 2020, and wanted me to address communication aspects of the story. I agreed. I offered a lot of suggestions in our 1-hour, 13-minute December 22 interview, from resurrecting CDC media briefings to recruiting sources who were locally trusted and sources (e.g. Donald Trump) who were trusted by otherwise recalcitrant prospective vaccinees. I also cautioned against overselling, and especially against treating people who just wanted to watch and wait for a while as if they were die-hard antivaxxers. Kimberly included a fair number of my points in her article.
The article is located off this site, behind a paywall.
The MP3 of the interview is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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To End the Pandemic, the COVID-19 Vaccine Must Clear One Final Obstacle
Posted on the Inverse website, December 23, 2020
Emma Betuel writes for Inverse, an online magazine chiefly for millennials. She wanted to ask me about how to build COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. I wanted to tell her about how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was intentionally dragging its feet in the COVID-19 vaccine approval process. The interview focused mostly on my topic, but covered hers briefly as well. Not surprisingly, the article she eventually posted covered only her topic. This was not the first time I had failed to get the FDA slow-walking story out. I am also posting a brief note – but not brief enough to put here – on the backstory of my unsuccessful, ambivalent efforts to publish the FDA slow-walking story, culminating in this for-the-record audio post of my interview with Emma.
The article in Inverse is located off this site.
The MP3 of the interview is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Posted on the Washington Post website, September 28, 2020
The CDC’s Massive Loss of Credibility Is Partly Because of the Spokespeople It Used
Email from Jody Lanard to Washington Post reporter Lena H. Sun, September 25, 2020
On September 22, Washington Post national health reporter Lena H. Sun wrote to my wife and colleague Jody Lanard for comments about the “crisis of trust for CDC at this pivotal juncture.” Jody’s September 25 response focused mostly on the CDC’s failure to use or develop trusted spokespersons. Several quotes from Jody’s response were used in the resulting September 28 article by Lena and Joel Achenbach. The article covered a number of reputation-undermining aspects of the CDC’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic – many of them controversies over messaging. Some were a function of political interference, but others were simply the result of the CDC’s own mismanagement. The article’s title says it all: “CDC’s credibility is eroded by internal blunders and external attacks as coronavirus vaccine campaigns loom.” A slightly edited version of Jody’s response is posted here.
Lena H. Sun and Joel Achenbach’s article is located off this site.
Jody Lanard’s email to Lena H. Sun is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
The company of the dead: part three
Posted on The Turnstone (Melanie Newfield’s blog), August 16, 2020
The subtitle of this short essay is more informative than its title: “Why we shouldn’t ignore the risks of vaccines.” The title makes sense if you read part one, which begins with all the childhood infectious disease deaths memorialized in a nineteenth century New Zealand cemetery. All three parts are about the value of vaccines and why it’s sometimes hard to convince people to accept vaccination – a topic Melanie was drawn to by the likely imminence of a Sars-CoV-2 vaccine. Melanie’s day job is as a plant biologist for the New Zealand government, focusing mostly on invasive species. Part three begins with some lovely examples of her efforts to persuade people that it’s okay to destroy beautiful weeds with toxic pesticides. She writes with respect for people who resist her pleas – and even with respect for people who lack respect for those resistors. She similarly urges respect for anti-vaxxers even as she admits sometimes laughing at the snarky anti-antivax jokes her friends send her. Melanie credits my book on Responding to Community Outrage with helping form her approach to risk communication, which gives me an excuse to tell readers about this essay.
This file is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
Outdoor Masking Isn’t Always Needed
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, August 19, 2020
Pro-Mask Advocacy When Even COVID-19 Is Polarized
Email (with small edits) from Peter M. Sandman to Bloomberg News reporter Faye Flam, August 15, 2020
On August 13, Joe Biden called for a national mandate for everyone to wear a mask outside. The evidence was overwhelming, he said, that doing so would exponentially reduce COVID-19 transmission. Two days later, Bloomberg reporter Faye Flam sent me an email asking what I thought of Biden’s remarks. In my reply later that day I said it was puzzling that Biden emphasized mask-wearing outdoors rather than indoors, and poor risk communication for him to overstate the value of masks and the certainty of the evidence; I also suggested that a national mask requirement might well be unconstitutional. I added a few additional points about pro-mask advocacy, including my beliefs that bandwagoning works better than finger-wagging and that harassing the holdouts was probably less productive than helping the compliant majority choose more effective masks. Faye’s resulting August 19 story used only a little of my email, a slightly edited version of which is posted here.
Faye Flam’s Bloomberg Opinion article is located off this site.
Peter M. Sandman’s email to Faye Flam is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
The U.S. Can Control Covid Without a Second Lockdown
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, July 30, 2020
Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Faye Flam, July 23, 2020
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Faye Flam of Bloomberg News has periodically checked in with me by email or phone. I posted the audio of our hour-long February 9 interview, which was mostly about the need to sound the alarm more aggressively. Our July 23 interview, which ran almost 90 minutes, is a good follow-up. We focused on how I think the U.S. public health profession has mishandled and miscommunicated COVID-19 in the intervening months. First it underreacted and left us unprepared. Then it overreacted and sent us into lockdown. Then it justified the lockdown by promulgating a suppression narrative (prevent infections at all costs) instead of teaching us to balance priorities, flatten the curve, and “dance” with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Faye’s July 30 article is mostly in her voice, with few quotes from me or anyone else. But it captures much of what we talked about. I have divided the MP3 linked above into five segments; the titles are linked below – or see the same links with segment descriptions on the Media page.
These links launch MP3 audio files:
- Five ways public health misled us. (10.9MB, 7.5 min.)
- Suppression versus balance. (25MB, 17.5 min.)
- Tradeoffs. (24MB, 17 min.)
- Learning to dance. (19.5MB, 13.5 min.)
- How public health went wrong. (21MB, 15 min.)
The article in Bloomberg News is located off this site.
The MP3s of the whole interview and interview segments are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
What to make of Trump’s “new tone” at the Covid-19 briefings
Posted on the Vox website, July 22, 2020
My Fantasy: What if President Trump Unexpectedly Did Excellent COVID-19 Risk Communication
Email exchange between Peter M. Sandman and Dylan Scott, July 21, 2020
On July 21, a few hours before President Trump took the podium for his first COVID-19 briefing in some weeks, I got an email from Vox reporter Dylan Scott asking me – in essence – what I thought was likely to result from the resumption of these presidential briefings, in public health terms as well as politically. I responded with my fantasy of what I would most like to see the president say and how I thought various audiences would respond if he actually said it all (or even some of it). Dylan wrote back with follow-up questions that focused on whether I thought it was too late for Trump to do any good, especially if he was changing his tune only under pressure. I answered those questions too. Dylan’s July 22 story made only a little use of my comments, and no use at all – not surprisingly – of my fantasy. Our emails are posted here, slightly edited to take out some irrelevancies.
Dylan Scott's Vox article is located off this site.
The slightly edited email exchange is located on this site..This article is categorized as:
The muddled public message on coronavirus isn’t just confusing. It’s harmful
Posted on the CNN website, July 16, 2020
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Ivana Kottasová, July 13, 2020
CNN reporter Ivana Kottasová emailed me on July 10 with three questions relevant to a story she was writing “about the way public health authorities have been communicating throughout this pandemic.” On July 13 I emailed back answers to all three questions. Ivana’s July 16 story on the CNN website made use of only the first of my three answers, on what she called “muddled messaging” about issues like masks, airborne transmission, and social distancing. Are the sources “failing as crisis communicators,” she wanted to know, or “is it simply that the message evolves as we find out more about this virus?” My response started with advice to avoid overconfidence and warn the audience that your messages will inevitably change as more is learned. Then I segued to why I think public health messaging about masks changed for reasons that had little to do with changing evidence, and everything to do with dishonesty. Her story used some of both parts. (She also used a different quote for CNN’s daily coronavirus update.) This is my answer to Ivana’s first question. I may eventually find a different use for my answers to the other two.
Ivana Kottasová's CNN article is located off this site.
The email to Ivana Kottasová is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
COVID-19 Risk Communication Q&A
Email “interview” of Peter M. Sandman by Alan Crawford of the Public Affairs Council, May 31, 2020
I used to do an annual one-day risk communication seminar for the Public Affairs Council (PAC). When PAC’s Alan Crawford asked me to do a telephone interview on COVID-19 risk communication for the organization’s monthly online newsletter, Impact, I asked him to email me a set of questions instead. On May 25, he sent me 17 challenging questions, pretty much running the gamut. I got my responses back to him on May 31. Alan scheduled a “somewhat edited” version of the Q&A as a two-parter for the June and July/August editions of the newsletter, but gave me permission to post the whole unedited Q&A as soon as his first installment appears. So here it is. If you want to read the edited version, both current and past issues of Impact are archived at https://pac.org/impact/archive.
The edited two-part email “interview” is located off this site.
The complete email “interview” is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Scientists caught between pandemic and protests
Posted on the Axios website, June 10, 2020
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Bryan Walsh, June 9, 2020
On June 8, I posted a website column entitled “Public Health Professionals Should Be Saying THIS about the Public's COVID-19 Risk Choices,” arguing against a double standard for mass events the profession approves of (the George Floyd protest marches) versus mass events it disapproves of (such as anti-lockdown demonstrations). That same day, Bryan Walsh of Axios sent me an email asking for follow-up comment. Bryan asked two questions, which I answered the next day. The resulting June 10 article by Bryan and Alison Snyder quoted several other people as well, and relied on my email for just one paragraph. My email is posted here.
Bryan Walsh and Alison Snyder's Axios article is located off this site.
The email to Bryan Walsh is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
How We Can Get the Next Phase of the Coronavirus Right
Published in The New York Times, May 14, 2020
I rarely post articles that simply reference things I’ve written previously, even if I think they got me right and used me well. And this New York Times op-ed doesn’t even mention my name. But it’s an excellent summary by Charlie Warzel of the report Jody Lanard and I published recently for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy on “Effective COVID-19 Crisis Communication.”
(You can read the same piece on this website if you prefer.) And it embeds the summary in Warzel’s thoughtful discussion of how to talk to people who accepted the sacrifices of lockdown to “flatten the curve,” got the impression that would be the end of the pandemic, and now resent demands for further sacrifices even after the curve has been flattened where they live. This file is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
We Can’t Wait Until It’s Safe to Lift Lockdowns
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, May 11, 2020
Bloomberg News reporter Faye Flam checks in with me periodically to talk about COVID-19. Our May 5 conversation focused on our shared sense that the purpose of lockdowns – and more broadly, the purpose of social distancing – had never been successfully communicated in the U.S., setting up unrealistic expectations for the reopening of the economy. In a grossly oversimplified nutshell, social distancing aims to “flatten the curve” – to slow the spread of the virus so fewer people are infected at the same time, keeping hospitals from getting so overwhelmed they can’t save lives they could otherwise have saved. Lockdowns are an extreme version of social distancing that make temporary sense in places where hospitals are already close-to-overwhelmed. But pandemics keep infecting people until herd immunity is achieved, so coming out of lockdown inevitably means an increase in infections and therefore in deaths. The best you can do is to keep hospitals functioning and the most vulnerable people protected, so you get to herd immunity with the fewest possible deaths. Faye’s May 11 article tries to explain some of this. I wish she’d stressed more the stunning failure of officials and experts to explain it … to the point where most eventually stopped trying, accepting the false premise that we shouldn’t come out of lockdown until we can do so “safely.”
This file is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
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Why People Feel Misinformed, Confused, and Terrified About the Pandemic
Posted on the Nautilus website, May 7, 2020
Outrage Management: The Next Stage in COVID-19 Pandemic Risk Communication
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Robert Bazell, May 2, 2020
On April 24, I received an email from Robert Bazell (NBC News’s longtime science correspondent, now teaching at Yale University), about an article he wanted to write about COVID-19 risk communication. After an exchange of emails, he wound up producing a May 7 article in the online science magazine Nautilus that relied partly on a piece Jody Lanard and I had just written on “Effective COVID-19 Crisis Communication” and partly on an email I had sent him on May 2, commenting on what I thought was coming next: COVID-19 outrage management. The version of the email posted here has been modestly revised.
Robert Bazell’s Nautilus article is located off this site.
The email to Robert Bazell is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Post-Virus Reopening Is More About Ethics than Science
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, April 14, 2020
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Bloomberg News reporter Faye Flam, April 13, 2020
On April 13, Bloomberg News reporter Faye Flam sent me an email asking for my thoughts on when and how to transition the U.S. from COVID-19 lockdown to some kind of New Normal. I answered immediately. Since I have no expertise on the scientific questions involved in this decision, I focused on a risk communication aspect of the decision: the fact that so much of the public had gotten the misimpression that ending lockdown should be done “safely” – that is, in such a way that no one or nearly no one dies as a result. In reality, ending lockdown means killing people. Doing it right doesn’t mean stopping the spread of the virus; it means keeping the spread slow enough that hospitals aren’t overrun. The tradeoff between saving the most lives and saving the most of our way of life is not a scientific question, I wrote. It is a political question. So it would help if the public had a better understanding of what’s at stake. Faye’s story naturally focused on the scientific questions, but she also included some of what I had to say.
Faye Flam’s Bloomberg Opinion article is located off this site.
The email to Faye Flam is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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CDC’s Public Communication about COVID-19: Maybe Going Silent Is an Improvement
Posted: April 13, 2020
On April 6, John Tozzi of Bloomberg News asked if he could interview me for a story “about CDC’s public communications in the COVID-19 pandemic.” I suggested he email me a few questions instead, which he did. He wanted to know what I thought was different in the way the CDC was communicating about COVID-19, compared to other outbreaks and epidemics. He focused especially on the agency’s comparative silence in recent weeks, asking whether I thought that had left a vacuum filled by competing voices, and whether I thought the competing voices had led to harmful consequences “that could have been avoided or reduced with more clear communication from CDC.” I wasn’t as convinced as John’s questions suggested he expected me to be that the CDC’s silence had done harm. In fact, my April 7 responses wondered whether widespread debate might actually serve the public better than CDC communication dominance would have done, given what I saw as the CDC’s less-than-sterling COVID-19 communication record before it went silent. John’s story didn’t use any of my comments.
This file is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
How to Talk to Patients About COVID-19
Posted in ENTtoday, April 8, 2020
On March 26, freelance medical writer Mary Beth Nierengarten emailed me some questions about how ear, nose, and throat doctors “can talk to their patients in ways that will be clear, effective, and transparent” about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several question were focused on helping patients deal with the likely need to postpone their ENT procedures, but Mary Beth was also interested in how to talk about patients’ pain and about COVID-19 itself. I emailed some answers on March 31, which she crafted into a Q&A article published in ENTtoday on April 8. My answers certainly didn’t break new ground, but they might be of some use to any professional trying to communicate empathically with clients, customers, or patients about pandemic cancelations. They were grounded in three crisis communication basics: (a) Candor is paradoxically more comforting than over-reassurance to people who are anxious or frightened; (b) When people are feeling an acute loss of control, it helps to find ways they can feel more in control; and (c) Instead of guessing or assuming you know what a patient (or anyone) wants from you, it’s often better to ask.
This file is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
Carefree Amid a Contagion: How to Talk to Covid-19 Skeptics
Posted on the Undark website, March 24, 2020
Pandemic Apathy, Denial, Skepticism, and Ideology
Email exchange between Teresa Carr and Peter M. Sandman, March 23, 2020
On March 23, Teresa Carr of the online magazine Undark emailed me some thoughtful questions for her column on how to get through to people who aren’t taking COVID-19 seriously enough. I wanted to answer at length, but she was on a tight deadline, so I stuck to two topics. My first topic was the distinction between apathy and denial – and the risk of assuming people are unconcerned when they may be exactly the opposite: too frightened to bear their fear. My second topic was a reaction to Teresa seeming to equate apathy, skepticism, and rightwing ideology as all pretty much the same objectionable thing. I offered a brief defense of pandemic skepticism, and a critique of dismissing it as merely apathy or, worse, as rightwing ideology. She used some of my comments in her resulting article, despite its title: “Carefree Amid a Contagion: How to Talk to Covid-19 Skeptics.”
Teresa Carr’s Undark article is located off this site.
Our email exchange is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
When It Comes to the Pandemic, Scared Is Good
On March 11, I received an email from an editor at London’s Sunday Times asking me to “write a piece on why panic is useful in the coronavirus epidemic.” Within the 1,200-word limit he set me, I ended up writing about why fear is useful – and why fear isn’t panic. I also worked in adjustment reactions and the strange mix of gnawing anxiety and insufficient action I was seeing in so many people’s response to COVID-19. I hate writing short – for me, 1,200 words is a tweet – but I thought the op-ed ended up a fairly decent overview of topics I’ve written about at greater length elsewhere. So when the Sunday Times decided not to use the piece (my editor says he was off that day), I decided to post it anyway.
This file is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
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On March 5 I received a phone call, a text, and an email from the BBC World Service radio program “Newshour,” asking if I could go on the air minutes later to debate COVID-19 fears and preparations with Clare Wenham, a London School of Economics professor. The producer quickly sent me Dr. Wenham’s article, “Is reporting of the coronavirus producing viral panic?” which I skimmed just before we started. Our six-minute conversation skimmed lightly over the usual topics: Is the public panicking or going through a normal and useful adjustment reaction? Are governments overreacting or underreacting, and which is worse? What role is media sensationalism playing?
This is an audio (MP3) file, 8.8MB, 6:16 minutes, located on this site.
It’s dangerous for governments to claim the coronavirus outbreak is under control
Posted on the Quartz website, February 26, 2020
On February 22, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard received an email from Mary Hui, a reporter for Quartz based in Hong Kong, asking to interview her about coronavirus risk communication. They talked on February 24 about a variety of relevant issues. Mary’s story emphasized one key one, the need for candor rather than over-reassurance about the likely hard time ahead. The story was published early on February 26, Hong Kong time, two days before President Trump’s over-reassuring press briefing.
This file is located off this site.
This article is categorized as:
Four COVID-19 Emails to Four Journalists
Jody Lanard and I have been fielding inquiries from reporters covering various aspects of COVID-19. We decide which ones to respond to based mostly on whether the questions they ask provoke us to want to respond. Mostly we respond with emails rather than telephone interviews. As events overtake their stories – events more relevant to the general public than the musings of a couple of newly unretired risk communication experts – most of the reporters end up using little or nothing of what we send them. Here in chronological order are four of our recent emails:
- “Allaying Panic Is Not a Key Goal of COVID-19 Risk Communication Right Now” (to Ed Cara of Gizmodo, February 25)
- “How Should Anxious Doctors Talk to Anxious Patients about COVID-19; The Risk of Overreacting” (to Kate Johnson of Medscape Medical News, February 25)
- “Comparing COVID-19 to Seasonal Flu; Transitioning from Containment to Mitigation; the Powers of Local Public Health Officials” (to Nicoletta Lanese of Live Science, February 26)
- “Determination, Not Cheerleading: A Reaction to President Trump’s February 26 COVID-19 News Conference” (to Sarah Owermohle of POLITICO, February 27)
This file is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Past Time to Tell the Public: “It Will Probably Go Pandemic, and We Should All Prepare Now”
Ian Mackay is an Australian virologist with a distinguished record of explaining virology to non-virologists. “Virology Down Under,” his blog and podcast, is always useful and often wonderful. On February 22, 2020, he wrote to ask whether we agreed that it was time to call COVID-19 (“Wuhan coronavirus”) a pandemic. We replied that it was past time. In the resulting email exchange, we proposed to write something that he could post on his blog and we could post on this website. This is what we wrote.
Spanish translation available
This file is located both on this site and on Ian Mackay’s “Virology Down Under” blog.
The Spanish translation, by Daniel Romero-Alvarez, is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Coronavirus Complacency Arrives Ahead of Schedule
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, February 11, 2020
A Wide-Ranging Interview on the Coronavirus Pandemic-To-Be
(Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (80.1MB, 57 min.)Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Faye Flam, February 9, 2020
Faye Flam of Bloomberg News has interviewed me on several risk communication issues over the years, so I wasn’t surprised when she said she wanted to talk to me about coronavirus risk communication. Our February 9 telephone conversation ran 57 minutes, and covered a range of topics, some of them more about the pandemic-to-be itself than about its risk communication implications. Faye’s February 11 article made very little use of the interview. She may or may not use it for additional articles to come; if she does, I’ll post the links. In the meantime, I have divided the hour-long MP3 linked above into six segments; titles linked below or see the same links with segment descriptions on the Media page.
These links launch an MP3 audio file:
- Why worry now. (13MB, 9.55 min.)
- Why tell now. (17.5MB, 12.2 min.)
- Containment. (15.3MB, 10.5 min.
- Scaring people. (16.8MB, 11.6 min.)
- Preparedness. (9MB, 6.2 min.)
- Conspiracy theories. (9MB, 6.3 min.)
The article in Bloomberg News is located off this site.
The audio of the whole interview and interview segments are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
A Coronavirus Risk Communication Role Model in Singapore
Email from Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman to Bloomberg News reporter Jason Gale, February 9, 2020
In 2003, Jody Lanard and I wrote an article about "SARS Communication: What Singapore Is Doing Right" for Singapore’s dominant English-language newspaper, the Straits Times. So of course we have been following Singapore’s handling of another coronavirus (this one spreading from Wuhan, China) with great interest. Once again, in our judgment, Singapore is doing a wonderful risk communication job – not perfect, but amazingly close, a role model for any country – or any city – willing to treat its public with respectful candor instead of condescending over-reassurance. So when Bloomberg News reporter Jason Gale emailed us on February 9, 2020, asking for our assessment of a spectacular speech by Singapore’s prime minister, we jumped at the chance to respond. The resulting short article in Bloomberg Quint made no use of our response. We hope others will make some use of Singapore’s spectacular example.
The email to Jason Gale is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Wuhan Coronavirus: Some Lessons from SARS, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Ebola, etc.
Email from Peter M. Sandman to New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, January 25, 2020
On January 24, New York Times reporter Amy Harmon emailed me for comment on an article she was writing about the Wuhan coronavirus, especially lessons to be learned from the way past infectious disease outbreaks were communicated. I responded on January 25. After some introductory context grounded in risk communication basics, I focused on over-reassurance and overconfidence, two of the biggest errors in risk communication about SARS, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, etc. Amy had asked in particular about local decision-making versus CDC policy, and about school and university infection control policies. So I addressed those two as well, emphasizing the value of local control and the dangers of stigmatizing stigma.
Amy hasn’t yet written a story on any of this, and may never write one. (If she does, I’ll link to it here.) As I wrote to her: “What I have to say about risk communication is really for officials, activists, experts, and journalists, not for the audience that attends to them. I don’t see any harm in telling the public what risk communicators think about what their sources are telling them. But I don’t see a helluva lot of value or newsworthiness either.”
The email to Amy Harmon is located on this site.
This article is categorized as:
Coronavirus – Crisis Management, Risk Communications & Practical Advice for Key Executives
Posted on the Hennes Communications blog, February 2, 2020
Tell People Now that We Probably Can’t Stop the Coronavirus Pandemic that’s Probably Coming
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Bruce Hennes, February 2, 2020
On February 2, crisis communication consultant Bruce Hennes sent me two drafts about the Wuhan coronavirus that he wanted to post on his blog. One was basically excerpts from my recent post, “No Reason for Alarm” Is a Foolishly Over-Reassuring Message about the Novel Coronavirus Spreading from Wuhan, China. The other was Bruce’ s own thinking about how business leaders should prepare for the pandemic that might well be imminent. I emailed him comments on both, plus one longer suggestion for an insert in the second, launching from what he had written about the severe 1918 pandemic and the mild 2009 pandemic (both flu). He inserted it all.
The Bruce Hennes blog post is located off this site.
The email to Bruce Hennes is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Published in the National Post, January 30, 2020
Email from Peter M. Sandman to Sharon Kirkey, January 29, 2020
In 2003, Jody Lanard and I wrote a website column entitled “‘Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS’ – and So It Should!” Our critique of SARS risk communication advised officials and journalists not to be contemptuous of the public’s fears and not to underestimate the risk in a misguided effort to allay the public’s fears. These points were topmost in my mind when National Post reporter Sharon Kirkey emailed me on January 29, 2020 about the “new SARS,” a novel coronavirus spreading from Wuhan, China. Sharon’s January 30 article, an overview of “Coronavirus risk to Canadians,” devotes its last third or so to my core advice not to tell Canadians they shouldn’t worry.
The National Post article is located off this site.
The email to Sharon Kirkey is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
This article is categorized as:
2019
When Residents Say ’No‘ to Aerial Mosquito Spraying
Posted on the Undark Magazine website, October 25, 2019
Mosquito Spraying versus Eastern Equine Encephalitis: Two Small Risks Compete for Public Outrage
On October 16, 2019, I received an email from Michael Schulson, "a journalist for Undark Magazine, which covers science and society for a national audience from its headquarters at MIT." He wanted to interview me by phone on a controversy in southwestern Michigan about aerial mosquito spraying against Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE). Instead of arranging a call, I sent him a brief email outlining my view: that both aerial spraying and EEE are small risks; that for understandable reasons spraying tends to arouse more public outrage than mosquito-borne diseases like EEE; and that in their effort to counter anti-spraying outrage public health officials tend to hype the (small) risk of mosquito-borne diseases while playing down the (also small) risk of spraying. Michael used portions of my email at the end of his article, which quite rightly focused on the particulars of the Michigan controversy.
The Undark Magazine article is located off this site.
The email to Michael Schulson is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
When It’s Okay for Health Officials to Panic, and When It’s Not
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, October 6, 2019
Honest versus Dishonest Teachable Moments in Public Health WarningsInterview with Peter Sandman by Faye Flam, September 24, 2019
Dishonest E-Cig Warnings and the Ethics of Health Scares
Two emails from Peter M. Sandman to Faye Flam, September 11 and September 13, 2019
In May 2019, Bloomberg reporter Faye Flam interviewed me
for a story on e-cigarette risk communication – and my view that the public health establishment has been dishonestly alarmist about vaping, so much so that it risks scaring people into smoking instead. On September 10, 2019, she emailed me to ask about a follow-up interview. We exchanged a few emails about whether Bloomberg would let her write another “pro-vaping” article, given Michael Bloomberg’s fervent opposition. So we started emailing back and forth about “health scares” more generically. Two of my emails to Faye strike me as worth posting: one on September 11 about the recent spate of lung injuries linked to vaping (especially vaping illegal marijuana); the other on September 13 about when it is or isn’t appropriate for public health officials to try to frighten the public. Our eventual September 24 interview dealt largely with e-cigs but also addressed some other health scares (bird flu, equine encephalitis, red meat, climate change), as did her resulting October 6 article. The interview, of course, is a lot more detailed than the very brief article.The Bloomberg Opinion article is located off this site.
The complete (audio) interview with Faye Flam and the two emails to Faye Flam are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Are E-Cigs a Crisis? It’s Risky to Call Them ‘Unsafe’
Posted on the Bloomberg Opinion website, June 3, 2019
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Interview with Peter Sandman by Faye Flam, May 28, 2019
I am very nearly retired, but when Bloomberg commentator Faye Flam asked to interview me about e-cigarettes, I couldn’t resist saying yes. I have been highly critical of how the U.S. public health establishment smears e-cigs at least since 2015, when I posted “A Promising Candidate for Most Dangerously Dishonest Public Health News Release of the Year.” Precaution advocacy often exaggerates, and I am used to hyperbolic public health warnings about, say, the dangers of vaccine-preventable diseases. But such warnings can save lives even if they’re less than honest, which some say justifies the dishonesty. Warnings about e-cigs, on the other hand, could convince people that they might just as well smoke instead – a profound disservice if, as seems likely, vaping is an order of magnitude safer than smoking. Faye’s article is based on more than just her interview with me, and the interview has a lot of information she didn’t use in the article. So you might want to check out both.
(In the same interview, Faye also asked me about the failed Dengvaxia vaccine campaign in the Philippines. I’ll post that part of the interview with a link to her Dengvaxia article if she writes one.)The article is located off this site.
The audio file is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Managing Stakeholder Outrage: A Mutual Gains Approach
Posted on his website Message Maps for Foodborne Outbreaks and Product Recalls
Managing Stakeholder Outrage: A Mutual Gains Approach
Copy posted here with permission from Rusty Cawley
For more than a decade, Rusty Cawley has worked to integrate my approach to outrage management into his work at Texas A&M University. He describes himself as “a public relations counsel and risk communicator” at Texas A&M, “with experience in issues relating to foodborne, vector-borne, zoonotic, and trans-boundary pathogens.” Among his several websites over the years is “Message Maps for Foodborne Outbreaks and Product Recalls.” That website is devoted largely to applying Vincent Covello’s message mapping methodology to foodborne illnesses. But it also makes consistent (and accurate and wise) use of my outrage management thinking. This recent addition to his website is not about message mapping at all. Instead, it’s a wonderful amalgam of my work on outrage management and the work of negotiation expert Larry Susskind, especially his work with Patrick Field on the mutual gains approach to dealing with angry stakeholders.
This file is located both offsite and on this site.
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Why We’re Still So Unprepared for Flu and Other Crises
Posted on Bloomberg View, February 1, 2018
Journalist Faye Flam reached out to me on January 25, 2018, regarding a story she wanted to write “about the world’s lack of preparedness for a flu pandemic.” The result was a telephone interview that focused (among other topics) on the difficulty of figuring out which risks are more worth preparing for or protecting against than other risks. Risk analysis isn’t my field, but that didn’t keep me from pointing out that there are dozens of factors relevant to deciding how much of your limited budget to spend on – for example – hurricane preparedness versus nuclear attack prevention versus vaccine manufacturing capacity. Even if you had good measures of all the relevant factors, I added, prioritizing among them would still be a values question on which risk analysts are no more entitled to an opinion than ordinary citizens. I also emphasized my longstanding complaint that experts making a case for greater attention to one risk almost never nominate some other risk (especially one that’s also in their bailiwick) for less attention. “We need more money for X” is rarely accompanied by “we’re willing to cut our expenditures on Y.” Faye used most of that in her February 1 story.
This file is located off this site.
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Jean Scandlyn is a professor of “Health and Behavioral Sciences and Anthropology” at the University of Colorado Denver. In September 2017 she requested a telephone interview for research on how the oil, gas, and coal industries communicate “scientific research on climate change and energy extraction” to neighbors of their operations. (She said an industry client had recommended me.) I accepted. We agreed that I would wait till December to post the interview, to make sure another interviewee wouldn’t run across it and possibly be influenced.
In the interview I made my usual case about why mistrustful stakeholders rightly don’t rely much on scientific evidence from industry sources. Most of the generic principles I applied to fossil fuel controversies can be found in “Motivating Attention: Why People Learn about Risk – or Anything Else” (2012); “Three Ways to Manage Controversies” (2016); and “Fracking Risk Communication” (2013). My two main contentions: (1) Fossil fuel companies have more to gain by addressing people’s outrage than by trying to sell them on data to show they shouldn’t be outraged in the first place; and (2) Reluctant acknowledgments by expert opponents that the companies are partly right about something carry more weight than enthusiastic endorsements by expert supporters that the companies are entirely right about everything. Along the way I told a few stories from my consulting (without naming the clients, of course).
This audio file is located on this site.
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Mothers-in-law, profitability and wool’s social licence AWI-style
Posted on Sheep Central, May 19, 2017
AWI’s mother-in-law approach on animal rights’ wool criticism “accepted”
Posted on Sheep Central, May 22, 2017
May 18, 2017 email query from Terry Sim of Sheep Central and my May 19 response
Terry Sim is editor of Sheep Central, an Australian online sheep industry news service. On May 19, 2017, Sim posted an article about the strategic thinking of Marius Cuming, the corporate communications manager of trade group Australian Wool Innovation. The article reported that Cuming favored not addressing controversies, on the grounds that fighting with critics was like fighting with your mother-in-law, a fight you can’t win. (The controversy specifically referenced was mulesing – removing strips of wool-bearing skin from around the buttocks of sheep in order to reduce the number of flies that lay their eggs in the urine- and feces-contaminated wool.) According to Sim’s article, Cuming said the sheep industry should focus instead on simply selling wool. Sim emailed me the article with questions about my opinion on Cuming’s approach. My reply email agreed with Cuming that fighting with critics is a losing proposition. But I argued that Cuming was “way, way wrong” to suggest that his industry should ignore issues like mulesing, advocating an “acknowledge and improve” strategy rather than Cuming’s “low profile” recommendation. Sim’s May 22 follow-up article quoted most of my email.
The two Sheep Central articles are located off this site.
Terry Sim’s query and my response are located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Can Donald Trump Learn Anything From Businesses That Have Been Under Fire?
Posted (briefly) on Forbes, March 5, 2017
President Trump’s Russia Problem: Can Outrage Management Help?
Amalgam of two emails in response to a query from Ken Silverstein, March 4 and 5, 2017
Journalist Ken Silverstein sent me an email on March 3, 2017, about an article he wanted to write for Forbes about what he called “Trump’s Russian problem.” Ken asked in part: “Where will this end if he continues the current strategy? … What will happen if he comes totally clean, whatever that means? … Is this crisis management 101 – similar to what you instruct businesses to do?” I responded with two emails on March 4 and 5, emphasizing not just the outrage management strategies available to President Trump, but also two other points: the near-uselessness of outrage management if candidate Trump was actually guilty of colluding with Russian intelligence (which I doubted but did not rule out), and my judgment that Trump was unlikely to have the disposition or discipline to make use of outrage management advice. Ken’s story was based partly on my emails, partly on other outrage management principles he had gleaned from my website and our earlier communications, and partly from his own views on what he calls crisis management (“outrage management” in my jargon). Forbes decided not to use his story, but it was cached while briefly in the Forbes system. The version of what I sent him that’s posted here merges my two emails.
The article written for Forbes is now archived off this site.
The amalgam of two emails to Ken Silverstein is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Why Most People Don’t Pay Much Attention to the Fact that Alcohol Is a Carcinogen
Email in response to a query from Jennifer Chaussee, September 16, 2016
On September 14, 2016, Jennifer Chaussee of Wired Magazine emailed me about a story she was writing about “why there is such low awareness around the link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.” She said she was particularly interested in how my hazard-versus-outrage concept might be used to explain public apathy about the drinking-and-cancer connection. My emailed response two days later did cover the ground she wanted me to cover: the ways in which drinking-and-cancer is low-outrage. But I also discussed some other risk perception aspects of the issue. Jennifer’s excellent September 22 story was called “The Muddled Link between Booze and Cancer,” and focused on controversies over research results about the link. Her planned sidebar on outrage and public perception was dropped for space reasons. I’m posting the email I sent her anyway. I’m posting it under precaution advocacy even though it doesn’t really address how to get drinkers more worried about alcohol-and-cancer; it’s a good explanation of why that’s a tough assignment.
The email to Jennifer Chaussee is located on this site.
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Two-part interview with Peter M. Sandman by George Whitney of Complete EM, July 22, 2016.
George Whitney runs an emergency management consulting company called Complete EM. His website features a blog and a podcast series. On July 22, 2016 he interviewed me by phone for nearly two hours. He edited the interview into two podcasts, which he entitled “Dr. Peter Sandman – Risk Communication” and “Dr. Peter Sandman – Crisis Communication.” I have given them new titles.
“Scaring People: The Uses and Limitations of Fear Appeals”
isn’t really about emergency management or crisis communication at all. It’s about pre-crisis communication – a part of what I call precaution advocacy. When he briefed me for the interview, George had told me he wanted to focus on fear appeals. He thought emergency management professionals relied too much on fear in their warnings about earthquakes and other natural disasters, and he wanted to know whether I agreed. So for the first 45 minutes or so we talked about the uses and limitations of fear appeals. At the end of what became Part One of George’s two-part podcast, he asked me to reflect on what had changed in my 40+ years as a risk communication consultant. I cited two big changes: the slow migration from craft to science, and the growing understanding of what it takes to calm people who are more upset about some risk than you think they should be.“Crisis Communication for Emergency Managers,”
George’s Part Two, ranges more broadly. After distinguishing crisis communication from pre-crisis communication, I focused first on some crisis communication basics: don’t over-reassure, don’t be over-confident, don’t think people are panicking when they’re not. Then in response to George’s questions I addressed an assortment of additional topics: civil unrest; crisis planning; the L’Aquila earthquake communication controversy; crisis mnemonics like “Run – Hide – Fight”; how emergency management professionals can use social media; and the pros and cons of going public in a crisis before you have come up to speed.Both files are located on this site.
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High-profile cancer reviews trigger controversy
Published in Science, June 24, 2016 [Science requires a subscription]
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Email exchange with Kai Kupferschmidt of Science magazine, June 16–17, 2016
Processed Meats, Cancer, and Risk Communication: The World Health Organization’s Non-Warning Warning
October–November 2015 incomplete draft article sent as an attachment to Kai Kupferschmidt, June 17, 2016
On June 16, 2016, Science reporter Kai Kupferschmidt sent me an email asking me to comment for a story he was writing on a June 15 announcement by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) about the possible carcinogenicity of coffee and very hot beverages. The issues this announcement raised were very similar to the issues raised by an earlier IARC announcement about the carcinogenicity of processed and red meats. The issue of greatest interest to me: the distinction between the seriousness of a risk (how bad is it?) and the quality of the evidence about that risk (how sure are you?). In my June 17 response to Kai I referenced, and attached, a draft article I never finished about that earlier IARC announcement. Kai’s story had room for one quote from my email, but nothing from my unfinished article.
The Science article is located off this site.
The email exchange with Kai Kupferschmidt and the incomplete draft article are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Car Crashes and Mass Extinction Events: Communicating about High-Probability Low-Magnitude Risks
Email in response to a query from Faye Flam, May 10, 2016
An article in the April 29, 2016 issue of The Atlantic focused on a study claiming that the average person is likelier to die in a mass extinction event than in a car accident. On May 4 Faye Flam asked me to comment for an article she wanted to write for Bloomberg News about the resulting controversy, noting: “I think there’s probably a bigger story about misleading use of statistics and confusion about risk.” The “bigger story” I saw was a bit different: how to communicate about high-magnitude low-probability risks – the sorts of risks that people either exaggerate (if the risk arouses a lot of outrage and they focus on its high magnitude) or shrug off (if the risk arouses very little outrage and they focus on its low probability). On May 10 I emailed Faye this response. She wrote her story, but on May 17 the Bloomberg News editors decided not to run it, judging that the news peg – the Atlantic mass extinction article – was no longer of much interest to their readers.
The Bloomberg News article was never published.
The email to Faye Flam is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Crisis Experts Say WPP May Have Been Too Hasty in Defending JWT’s Accused CEO
Posted on the Adweek website, March 15, 2016
The JWT Ad Agency Can’t Keep Pretending It Doesn’t Know If Its CEO Is a Harasser and a Boor or Not
Email in response to a query from David Gianatasio, March 15, 2016
On March 10, 2016, the top public relations executive of the massive J. Walter Thompson advertising agency (JWT) filed suit against the agency and its CEO, Gustavo Martinez, accusing Martinez of an “unending stream of racist and sexist comments.” On March 15, Adweek journalist David Gianatasio emailed me in search of “crisis communication” (really outrage management) advice on how JWT should handle the controversy. My brief response emphasized that the agency had to know whether the accusations were basically true or not, and that its strategy should depend on that. A fair amount of my email was included in a March 15 article Gianatasio coauthored with Patrick Coffee and Katie Richards. (I have posted the whole email.)
The Adweek article is located off this site.
The email to David Gianatasio is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Is It Really GMOs or Insecticides? What’s Behind the Bogus Zika Rumors
Posted on the NBC website, February 25, 2016
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Email in response to a query from Maggie Fox, February 22, 2016
On February 22, NBC Reporter Maggie Fox emailed me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard for help with a story she wanted to write “shooting down the Zika rumors that won’t die.” She asked: “Why do people love, love, love to blame ‘toxic chemicals’ – in this case, larvicides? Why do people love to be scared of GMOs? Why are the conspiracy theorists ALWAYS the first ones to comment, and in ALL CAPS, on our stories?” Jody and I emailed her a quick response, some of which tried to answer her questions and some of which riffed on other aspects of Zika rumors. Maggie used parts of what we wrote in her story. Here is the whole email. It includes some points she probably didn’t expect us to make, including a defense of rumors in general and Zika rumors in particular, and a claim that experts and officials sometimes spread rumors too.
The NBC website post is located off this site.
The email to Maggie Fox is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Squeezed Between Zika Panic and Complacency
Posted on Bloomberg View, February 1, 2016
Zika Risk Communication: WHO and CDC Are Doing a Mostly Excellent Job So Far
Email in response to a query from Faye Flam, January 31, 2016
Reporter Faye Flam of Bloomberg View emailed me on January 29, asking to interview me on “the risk communication side of things” regarding the Zika epidemic in Latin America. I said I’d rather write answers to her written questions, so she sent me five of them. Jointly with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, I wound up answering three. We focused largely on Faye’s sense that the World Health Organization (WHO) was being too alarmist about Zika while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was being too reassuring. While we pointed to some flaws in both organizations’ Zika communications – especially CDC’s unwillingness to mention abortion in its discussion of what Zika-infected pregnant women might want to consider – we said we thought both were doing a mostly excellent job so far. We were particularly impressed with CDC’s insistence on the high level of Zika uncertainty. Faye used only a little of our email in her story. We’re posting the whole email, plus a few boxes we added afterwards.
The Bloomberg View article is located off this site.
The email to Faye Flam is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
What’s next, a Senate inquiry into infrasound from trees, waves or air conditioners?
Posted on The Conversation, November 18, 2015
Simon Chapman is a public health professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. In 1997, he and Sonia Wutzke published an analysis of Australian media coverage of the controversy over whether mobile telephone towers were a threat to health. They searched for examples of my various “outrage factors” and found many of them. This recent web post is a similar analysis – but without the media quotes – of a similar controversy: whether “infrasound” from wind farms is a threat to health. There’s no question that thousands of power-generating wind turbines whirring together produce a low-frequency and usually inaudible vibration (as does the wind itself). Whether or not wind farm infrasound is a significant hazard (he thinks it isn’t), Chapman explains neatly why it is a significant outrage.
This file is located off this site.
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Published in Journal of Risk Research, 2015 (published online November 5, 2015)
After an introduction with quotes from me, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, and others, this is a content analysis of one U.S. Ebola controversy – New Jersey’s quarantine (and later isolation) of returning volunteer nurse Kaci Hickox – as it was covered in two New York City newspapers. The article focuses on the contrast between the news coverage of the controversy and the hundreds of readers’ comments in the online editions of the two papers. The news coverage depicted the controversy as a battle between science and fear: the mainstream public health position that there’s no need to quarantine people who have been exposed to Ebola unless they already show symptoms versus the demands of the irrational, panicky public that asymptomatic volunteers returning from West Africa be quarantined anyway. By contrast, the content analysis suggests – and extensive examples illustrate – that pro-quarantine reader comments showed the same mix of evidence and emotion as anti-quarantine comments. While qualitative content analysis of reader comments in two newspapers can’t be considered definitive evidence, I certainly agree with the authors that the anti-quarantine position was articulated overconfidently and even arrogantly - and that there was a sound case to be made for either position, depending mostly on how cautious a citizen, health official, or governor wanted to be in the face of considerable scientific uncertainty. (Note: The link takes you to an abstract; the article itself is behind a firewall.)
This file is located off this site.
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The Lion-Hunter and the Dentist-Hunters: Why the Slaying of Cecil the Lion So Outraged the Public
Email in response to a query from Jennifer Bjorhus, August 3, 2015
The poaching of a Zimbabwean lion by Minnesota dentist and recreational big-game hunter Walter Palmer provoked a powerful outburst of public outrage in late July 2014. It was a big local story for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and on August 3 reporter Jennifer Bjorhus sent me an email asking why the killing “has sparked such a high level of public outrage.” This is the email I sent back in response, that same day. Ultimately the newspaper decided not to do a story on why people were so outraged at Dr. Palmer, perhaps afraid the story would cause them to refocus their outrage (and in some cases their violence) on the paper’s staff. On August 14 Jennifer Bjorhus gave me the go-ahead to post my email without waiting for her story, noting that my observations “will be woven into a larger story down the line.”
The email to Jennifer Bjorhus is located on this site.
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A Must-Read Treatment of the CDC’s Campaign of Deception Regarding E-Cigarettes
Posted on “The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary,” June 24, 2015
Dr. Michael Siegel teaches in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health. He’s an M.D. with a longtime interest in public health communication, whose writing has migrated from an anti-smoking focus to an anti-anti-vaping focus. If you’re interested in the possibility that electronic cigarettes might not be as bad as public health’s anti-e-cig vendetta claims, Dr. Siegel’s blog is must reading. So of course I am pleased that he describes as must reading my May 2015 column about a dishonest news release from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about teenage use of tobacco. His article is a solid summary of my column’s critique of how the CDC willfully misinterpreted the newest data on teenage smoking (down) and vaping (up), intentionally fostering the misimpression that the news was bad in order to nurture its anti-vaping campaign.
This file is located off this site.
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CDC, Sandman, and finding an “honest” appraisal of e-cigarettes
Posted on the HealthNewsReview website, June 12, 2015
HealthNewsReview does wonderful online assessments of medical reporting and medical public relations, analyzing both exemplary and substandard work. Though its focus is mostly on drugs and treatments, not public health, I thought it might be interested in my May 2015 column excoriating a very dishonest news release from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about teenage use of tobacco. In my view, the release was way too alarmist about an increase in teenage vaping, failing to pay appropriate attention to the decrease in teenage smoking, to the near-certainty that vaping is orders of magnitude less dangerous than smoking, and to the possibility that vaping might turn out to be a replacement for smoking rather than a gateway to smoking. I sent HealthNewsReview a quick note about the column, and was delighted when it asked medical journalist Andrew Holtz to write something about it. Holtz summarized my critique, did his own assessment of the CDC release, and went on to offer some generic advice (and useful sources) for reporters trying to cover the e-cigarette controversy.
This file is located off this site.
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Why It’s OK To Worry About Ebola, And What’s Truly Scary
Posted on the NPR website, October 30, 2014
Nancy Shute of NPR emailed me on October 28 to arrange an interview about Ebola, not for radio but for the NPR website. We agreed to focus on both what I thought about Americans’ Ebola fears and what I thought was worth fearing. Our October 29 phone conversation lasted about an hour and wasn’t taped. I tried to connect the two topics by emphasizing that when people are learning about a new risk they often emphasize the aspects that are most immediate, nearby, and personal, rather than the aspects that will ultimately be most important. I said the job was to use the teachable moment by helping people transition to the most worrisome aspects – which for Ebola, in my judgment, is the possibility of more epidemics throughout the developing world. I criticized officials, experts, and the media for trying to squelch people’s Ebola fears instead of trying to guide them, thus sacrificing the teachable moment. Nancy did a good job of condensing that and more into the short article she posted on the 30th.
This file is located off this site.
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Aired on PBS, October 16, 2014
“Here & Now” telephoned my wife and colleague Jody Lanard on October 14, asking her to come into a New York City studio to tape an interview about
whether Americans are overreacting to a domestic Ebola “crisis” that has so far resulted in just one death. She did the interview the next day. Jody stressed that it’s rational to pay attention to a risk you’re newly aware of, even if that attention is temporarily excessive, and that people will get past their temporary adjustment reaction more quickly if officials don’t label it irrational or panic. We have already decided how worried to be about flu, car crashes, and other familiar risks, she said. “We’re not going to decide … that this is the week we should pay more attention to driving safety. This is the week we are going to learn about Ebola.” The edited file is located off this site.
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Official Ebola Risk Communication: “Don’t Scare the Children”
Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (52MB, 38 min.) on this site. Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Betsy McKay of the Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2014
On October 13, 2014, at her request, I did a telephone interview with Betsy McKay of the Wall Street Journal on the way U.S. officials at the CDC were communicating about Ebola in Dallas. I focused at the start on my opinion that officials weren’t emphasizing Ebola uncertainties sufficiently; I relied especially on two examples of what I consider over-confident over-reassurance: whether Ebola sufferers always have a sudden onset of symptoms, and whether they’re never able to transmit the disease before those symptoms arrive. Later in the interview I turned to other Ebola risk communication issues. Among them: (a) The CDC’s rush to blame the nurse and the hospital system for a “breach of protocol” when she caught the disease from her patient, rather than suggesting that maybe the equipment or protocol might themselves be to blame; (b) My view that the widespread public fear about Ebola was not panic but simply a temporary adjustment reaction, and that the CDC should say so; and (c) My desire to see the CDC urge people to worry more about the possibility that the West African epidemic could spread through the developing world, instead of urging people simply to stop worrying about Ebola. Betsy didn’t end up writing any stories that made use of this interview, though maybe it was useful background for her. With her permission, I recorded my answers without her questions. I have cut some desultory conversation from the beginning and end of the audio file, but otherwise this is the whole interview. Remember, it took place on October 13: before the second nurse got sick, before the CDC decided it should recommend more protective PPE, etc.
This is an audio MP3 file, 52 MB, 38 minutes, located on this site.
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Health officials struggle to control the media narrative about Ebola
Published in The Hill, October 12, 2014
Three Priorities for Ebola Messaging
Email in response to a query from Elise Viebeck, October 10, 2014
Reporter Elise Viebeck of The Hill emailed me on October 10, asking for input to an article she was writing on “how the CDC is struggling to control the media narrative on Ebola,” especially what she called “the balancing act they face between maintaining public calm and pressing for a greater response to the epidemic.” I replied that same day with an email outlining “three themes for CDC’s Ebola messaging that I think are not coming across well enough yet”: that Americans are resilient; that there is a huge amount we don’t know yet about Ebola; and that the biggest threat is the possibility of seeing similar epidemics in other parts of the developing world. Elise’s story made some use of the first two themes.
The article in is located off this site.
The email to Elise Viebeck is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Homeland Security: An Emotional Response Plan
Published in Security Management, October 2014
[Note: Available in the print edition only]The Role of Emotion in Crisis Communication
Email responding to questions from Lilly Chapa, July 5, 2014
On June 30, 2014, reporter Lilly Chapa emailed me about an article she was writing for Security Management, a monthly industry trade publication, on “taking emotional response into consideration when building a crisis response plan.” Instead of an interview, we agreed that she would email me questions, which she did. I responded on July 5, but promised not to post the Q&A until her article was published. The article ran in the October issue under the title “Homeland Security: An Emotional Response Plan.” It is available in the print edition only, but the Q&A is on this site. As it turned out, Lilly’s questions got me going on two other topics besides emotional response: the distinctions among pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis communication; and the errors organizations most typically make in their crisis response planning. Finally we got to what I thought would be her focus, planning for the likely emotional reactions of victims, bystanders, and emergency responders themselves.
The Security Management article is available in the print edition only.
The email to Lilly Chapa is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
How to talk to the public about Ebola: Five tips from risk communication experts
Posted on ScienceInsider, October 9, 2014
What Needs to Change in Ebola Risk Communication: Pivoting away from Dallas
Email response to query from Kai Kupferschmidt, October 5, 2014
Kai Kupferschmidt emailed me on October 5 asking to interview me about Ebola risk communication, especially with regard to uncertainty and future scenarios. I got his okay to respond via a joint email with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. Our email outlined what it would take for U.S. Ebola coverage to pivot away from one case in Dallas to thousands in West Africa and the threat of a global Ebola pandemic. We also described four competing responses to the West Africa epidemic: vaccine development, “spark suppression” (trying to confine the epidemic to West Africa), patient isolation and contact tracing, and treatment. We emphasized our view that, post-Dallas, spark suppression would be the big story. We concluded the email with five recommendations for improving Ebola risk communication and a short list of relevant risk communication principles. Kai’s post quoted the five recommendations verbatim, and summarized much of the rest – along with some additional content documenting what he called the “media frenzy” in the U.S. Our complete email is on this site.
The article is located off this site.
The email to Kai Kupferschmidt is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Ebola Outbreak As Black Swan: How To Think Clearly About An Unpredictable Hazard
Posted on the Forbes website, October 7, 2014
Science writer Faye Flam interviewed me for almost an hour on October 6, ranging widely from the basics of risk communication to the specifics of Ebola news coverage. Then she harvested the interview for a short Forbes website post that framed Ebola in terms of my signature hazard-versus-outrage distinction. Two other points she took from the interview that aren’t stressed enough in most Ebola stories: (1) that risk is a future-oriented concept, so what matters isn’t the current U.S. prevalence of Ebola but its possible future impact on our lives; and (2) that all the uncertainties of Ebola mean reporters should be focusing on both likeliest scenarios and worst case scenarios (the ones that aren’t vanishingly unlikely), and on the high probability of surprises to come. There was a lot more in the interview; if Faye gets me the audio I will post it.
This file is located off this site.
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Health Care Risk Expert: There Are Little If Any Signs of Ebola Panic in the U.S.
Published in Seattle Weekly, October 7, 2014
Ellis Conklin called me on October 7 with a very specific story in mind: Why are Americans getting all panicky and hysterical about new diseases like Ebola and EV-D68? I gave him only ten minutes or so, running through my usual litany: People aren’t panicky or hysterical, they’re only worriedly interested; looking up a disease on Google isn’t panicking; reporters who write that “the public” is panicking invariably tell me they don’t personally know anyone who is panicking; it’s both natural and useful to have a brief “adjustment reaction” to a new risk; etc. Ellis took it all in, and wrote what I consider an excellent story.
This file is located off this site.
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Media goes overtime on Ebola coverage, but not necessarily overboard
Published in the Washington Post, October 6, 2014
Three Ebola News Stories: Dallas, West Africa, and What-If
Email reponse to query from Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, October 6, 2014
Paul Farhi emailed me on October 6 asking what I thought of Ebola media coverage. He was especially interested in whether I agreed that there was too much attention to one U.S. Ebola sufferer, especially compared to other U.S. health risks. I replied that same day, outlining three different Ebola stories: the domestic Ebola story in Dallas, the epidemic Ebola story in West Africa, and the what-if Ebola story in the rest of the world. I explained why I thought all three deserved coverage, but especially the third, which was badly under-covered. Paul’s article stuck to the emphasis in his email, contrasting Ebola in the U.S. with other diseases that are currently afflicting far more Americans, especially a previously rare enterovirus with the unexciting label “D68.” He used me only at the end of his piece, briefly, as the expert who disagreed with everyone else and thought Ebola wasn’t being over-covered. Even then he focused on the small part of my reply that had noted how scary Ebola is, deemphasizing my main point that Ebola poses genuinely important risks. But at least my view – “not necessarily overboard” – got into his article’s headline. My complete email to Paul is on this site.
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The email to Paul Farhi is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Edited interview with Peter Sandman by Jeremy Story Carter, September 3, 2014, aired on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Country Hour” radio program and posted on its website, September 9, 2014
Jeremy Story Carter interviewed me on September 3, 2014, halfway through a three-day risk communication seminar I ran in Melbourne, Australia. He let me start with the three paradigms of risk communication, and I got to squeeze in a few minutes halfway through on crisis communication (using the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as an example). But mostly Jeremy was interested in how farmers and farm industries should handle criticism, such as the recent attacks on the Australian wool industry by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). So we focused on outrage management: the importance of listening and validating people’s concerns; why it’s smarter to be responsive to groups like PETA than to counterattack; how to ameliorate the outrage of moderate critics even if more extremist critics are unsatisfiable; picking which concessions to make (which battles to lose); giving credit to critics for those concessions instead of claiming to have improved on your own; and why all that is hard to do when you’re just as outraged at your critics as your critics are at you. The edited interview on the ABC website runs 19:27. Jeremy also wrote a short text story for the website, which he entitled “Farmers told to stop fighting animal welfare activists and offer PETA an olive branch: risk communication expert.”
The edited interview and associated text story are located off this site.
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Editorial: Standing on the edge of time
Published in Peace News, June 2014
This short editorial from “the newspaper for the UK grassroots peace and justice movement” draws heavily on “Scared stiff – or scared into action,” an article I coauthored with JoAnn M. Valenti and published in the January 1986 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. That article focused on the ways in which activists opposing nuclear weapons might be frightening people into numbness, paralysis, or denial instead of inspiring them to join the cause. The Rai and Johns editorial applies some of our points to climate change activism, noting that “the disciplines of risk communication and disaster psychology may help us [climate change campaigners] to think new thoughts, and find new ways forward.” I have also written about this connection, in a 2009 column on “Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial.”
This file is located off this site.
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Posted on the Discovery News website, May 1, 2014
When a Ship Captain Abandons Ship Prematurely
Email to Sheila M. Eldred, April 30, 2014
On April 29, 2014, reporter Sheila M. Eldred of the Discovery News website emailed me about an article she was writing in the wake of an April 16 ferry disaster in South Korea on “why captains abandon ship.” My brief email in response stressed that a captain who abandons ship prematurely isn’t panicking, but is simply failing to be a hero in a situation where duty demands heroism. The temptation afterwards, I wrote, is to self-justify instead of admitting as much. Sheila’s story used a lot of my email.
The Discovery News article is located off this site.
The email to Sheila M. Eldred is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Tamiflu report comes under fire
Posted on the Nature website, April 22, 2014; published in the print edition of Nature, vol. 508, pp. 439–440 (April 24, 2014).
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Email to Declan Butler, April 15, 2014
In early April 2014, BMJ (British Medical Journal) published two articles reporting a research review by the Cochrane Collaboration, arguing that antiviral drugs are of minimal use against influenza. When reporter Declan Butler of Nature emailed me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard asking for comment on how the Cochrane Review was communicated, we quickly sent back a response summarizing two key criticisms of the Cochrane researchers: that they ignored the downsides of the Cochrane methodology, which considers only randomized controlled trials; and that they massaged and cherry-picked their own results to make them look worse for antivirals. Declan’s article addressed many aspects of this complicated story, and he had room for only a little of what we had sent him. Meanwhile, we had written a more comprehensive assessment, which we are posting on this website as an introduction to what we originally sent Declan.
The Nature article is located off this site.
The email to Declan Butler is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Posted on the website of Adweek, March 23, 2014
Data Breaches: Managing Reputational Impact
Email to David Gianatasio, March 4, 2014 (with two March 16 emails interpolated)
David Gianatasio of Adweek emailed me in mid-February 2014 about an article he was writing on “how data breaches and security concerns might impact brands such as Target” (which had announced a huge data breach two months earlier) and “how companies can handle the fallout.” In the weeks that followed, Dave sent me more specific questions. My answers stressed the importance of addressing the concerns of affected stakeholders as opposed to the general public; and of focusing on negative reputation as opposed to positive reputation. The reputational impact of a data breach, I argued, depends mostly on two factors: how competently a company was protecting customer data before the breach, and how empathically it responded after the breach. Very little in my answers is unique to data breaches. Similar advice can be found, for example, in “After the Disaster: Communicating with the Public,” my response to a different journalist’s questions about an April 17, 2013 explosion at a fertilizer facility in West, Texas. Dave ended up focusing more on the specifics of the Target breach than on what companies should do about breaches, but he did find room in the last half of his March 23 article for several snippets from my answers.
The Adweek article is located off this site.
The email to David Gianatasio is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
H7N9 cases grow by 7, along with China poultry industry outcry
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), February 6, 2014
Forgoing Trust, China’s Poultry Industry Lobbies for an H7N9 Cover-Up
Email to Lisa Schnirring, February 6, 2014
Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News (part of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota) has been writing frequent articles about H7N9 since that novel bird flu virus reappeared in China in late 2013. Among the developments she decided to cover in her February 6, 2014 article was a new lobbying effort by China’s poultry industry to suppress some information about new H7N9 cases, especially information it feared would exacerbate Chinese consumers’ growing avoidance of poultry. When I asked if her article could use a risk communication perspective, Lisa said yes. So my wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I sent her an email, emphasizing that cover-ups never reassure the public. To the contrary, people become much more concerned about a risk when they discover that potentially alarming information is being covered up. Lisa’s article included several quotes from our email elaborating on this point.
The CIDRAP News article is located off this site.
The email to Lisa Schnirring is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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With Chinese New Year H7N9 cases soar, but experts struggle to assess the risk
Distributed by The Canadian Press, January 31, 2014
Email to Helen Branswell, January 30, 2014
Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press is almost universally considered the “dean” of flu reporters. So of course she has paid close attention to H7N9, a novel bird flu virus that emerged in China about a year ago. H7N9 is harmless to poultry but often deadly to humans on those rare occasions when it passes from one to the other. On January 30, 2014, Helen sent an email jointly to me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, asking us to comment on “the challenge it [H7N9] poses in terms of risks communications.” Our answer focused on the difficulty of warning people about what might happen while reassuring people about what has happened so far. Helen used a few quotes from our answer in her story, along with others from flu experts (as opposed to risk communication experts) she had interviewed.
The Canadian Press article is located off this site.
The email to Helen Branswell is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Marco Werman, aired on “The World” on PRI (Public Radio International) and posted on its website, September 27, 2013
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its new report – claiming more certainty than ever before that the global warming threat is dire – Marco Werman of PRI’s “The World” interviewed me about why I thought many people might find the report’s conclusions hard to accept, and might go into a kind of psychological denial instead. The interview lasted about ten minutes, but was cut to less than five for airing. I made too many minor points that got used, albeit in abbreviated form. So my main point got almost completely lost – that climate change activists were their own worst enemies because they kept saying things that were likely to provoke or deepen people’s denial instead of things that could help people overcome their denial. For example, I told Marco, too many environmentalists were greeting the IPCC’s bad news triumphantly, almost gleefully – sounding more pleased that they were being proved right than devastated that the world’s in deep trouble. People who like their SUVs and are having a hard time accepting that they may have to give up their SUVs (that’s a kind of denial) may just barely be able to believe it if a fellow SUV fan sadly tells them so. They’re not about to believe it if it’s exultantly announced by someone who has hated the internal combustion engine since before global climate change was even an issue. For several better explanations of my thinking about climate change denial, see any of the other entries with “climate” and/or “denial” in their titles in the “On Environmental Activism” section of my Precaution Advocacy index.
Link off-site to a page with this 5-min. audio.
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Will Controversial Sports Team Names Be Gone in Five Years?
Published in Adweek, September 11, 2013
Sports Team Names that Offend Native Americans
Email to David Gianatasio, September 10, 2013
On September 10, 2013, David Gianatasio sent me an email, seeking comment for an Adweek story he was writing about “pro sports teams with Native American names.” He cited a new advertising campaign to pressure the Redskins to drop their name, and asked what “teams like the Redskins, Indians, Braves, Blackhawks, etc.” can do, “short of changing their names, to stave off bad PR ” – or whether they should “seriously consider name changes to stave off bad publicity around the subject once and for all.” This is my brief response, some of which he used in his story. (I’ve interpolated one paragraph from an email later that day responding to a follow-up question.)
The Adweek article is located off this site.
My email to David Gianatasio is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Informing Pointe-Claire residents was “a moral obligation”
Published in the Montreal Gazette, August 28, 2013
Keeping PCB Contamination Secret Increases the Risk of Public Overreaction
Email to Monique Muise, August 28, 2013
On August 28, 2013, Montreal Gazette reporter Monique Muise emailed me for comment on a PCB controversy in the nearby city of Pointe-Claire. An illegal and potentially dangerous PCB storage facility had gone unnoticed for years until a leak brought it to official attention in March. But officials still hadn’t told the public (or the neighbors) when a local journalist broke the story five months later. Monique wanted me to comment on the pros and cons of the decision to keep the information secret. My email focused on a common risk communication paradox: Officials suppress risk information because they mistrust people’s ability to avoid overreacting; when the information comes out, the secrecy makes people overreact; this convinces officials they were right to suppress the information. Monique used a few quotes from the email in her story, along with some excellent quotes from my Canadian colleague Bill Leiss.
The Montreal Gazette article is located off this site.
My email to Monique Muise is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Is MERS an emergency? Language of IHR boxes WHO into a messaging dilemma
Distributed by Canadian Press, July 16, 2013
MERS Isn’t an “Emergency” … Yet
Email to Helen Branswell, July 16, 2013
On July 15, 2013, Canadian Press medical reporter Helen Branswell asked for an interview about how the World Health Organization was setting itself up by convening an “Emergency Committee” to decide whether to recommend declaring the MERS coronavirus a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC). With MERS infecting only small numbers of people, nearly all of them in Saudi Arabia, wouldn’t such a declaration invite claims that WHO was once again hyping an infectious disease risk? We scheduled an interview for the morning of the 16th. I sent Helen this email beforehand. In both the email and the interview, I stressed that the word “emergency” implies urgency. But a MERS pandemic isn’t imminent, I said; what WHO really needs to do is alert people that a MERS pandemic (someday) could be horrific. Despite the unfortunate nomenclature – including the awkward pronunciation of the “PHEIC” acronym as “fake” – WHO could do a lot more than it’s doing to clarify the distinction.
The Canadian Press article is located off this site.
My email to Helen Branswell is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
After the Disaster: Communicating with the Public
Posted on the CropLife website, July 1, 2013
The deadly April 17, 2013 explosion at a fertilizer facility in West, Texas was a pretty big story despite being overshadowed by the Boston Marathon bombings two days earlier. On May 17, exactly a month later, Paul Schrimpf of the CropLife Media Group (a chain of agriculture-related trade journals) emailed me four questions about risk communication aspects of the explosion. I sent Paul my answers on May 26, and on July 1 the complete Q&A was posted on the CropLife website. (Excerpts are scheduled to be published in hard copy later in July.) Paul’s questions focused on how much fertilizer retailers and distributors elsewhere should say about the West explosion. Not surprisingly, I thought they should say a lot, using the event as a teachable moment rather than trying to avoid mentioning it. The beginning of my response also addresses questions I think need to be addressed after every industrial accident: Is this an example of egregiously bad risk management and/or risk regulation, or was this facility fairly typical until the accident? And was this an unlikely disaster with few if any policy implications, or was it “an accident waiting to happen” that should lead to new industry practices and new regulatory standards?
This file is located on this site.
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Whack-a-Mole? Build-a-Reactor? What Game Shall We Play?
Published in Fuel Cycle Week, June 27, 2013, p. 5.
Margaret Harding participated with me in a May 31, 2013 podcast entitled “Peter Sandman teaches nuclear communicators.” A few weeks later she wrote this one-page article summarizing some of what I said. The article includes some useful comments about the outrage management challenges facing proponents of nuclear power, but I like it mostly because of its excellent summary of the core principle that people judge risks to be serious because they’re upset, not the other way around.
This is an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file,
53 kB, located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Terrorists vs. Bathtubs
(Note: Link goes off-site to a page with a link to this 10-min. audio.)Aired on National Public Radio’s “On the Media” and posted on its website, June 21, 2013
Risk Communication in Practice(Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (79.5MB, 49 min.) on this site. Brooke Gladstone of “On the Media” interviewed me in my home for 49 minutes. We started out talking about claims by opponents of NSA telephone and email surveillance (in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks) that “more people have died from [whatever] than from terrorism” – and why these sorts of risk comparisons are unlikely to be convincing. That soon got me to the distinction between hazard and outrage. But Brooke didn’t let me do my usual hazard-versus-outrage introductory shtick. Instead, she kept asking for specifics – examples of how precaution advocacy and outrage management strategies work in practice. Toward the end of the interview, she pushed me to shoot from the hip about applications I hadn’t thought through: How would I use risk communication to defend government surveillance? To oppose it? To defend shale gas “fracking”? To oppose that? The interview that resulted is a different sort of introduction to risk communication than the one I usually give. The 10-minute broadcast segment is nicely edited; it’s very smooth and covers most of my main points. But I prefer the roughness and detail of the complete interview.
The NPR program is located off this site.
The complete interview with Brooke Gladstone is located on this site. (79.5MB, 49 min.)This article is categorized as:
Is SoCalEd Mired in Crisis Or Controversy?
Posted on the Forbes website, May 16, 2013
The Case against Keeping Secrets
Excerpts from an email to Ken Silverstein, May 16, 2013
On May 16, 2013, Ken Silverstein of Forbes interviewed me by telephone about a controversy over whether Southern California Edison had withheld information about problems at its San Onofre nuclear power plant. I didn’t know anything about the specifics of the controversy, but I was happy to talk about the generic question of why companies shouldn’t keep damaging information secret. In an email later that day, I elaborated on some of the points I had made on the phone. Ken’s online article and some edited excerpts from my email (only some of which Ken used in his story) are linked above.
The Forbes article is located off this site.
The excerpts from my email to Ken Silverstein are located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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H5N1 Researchers Ready as Moratorium Nears End
Published in Science, January 4, 2013, pp. 16–17.
The Moratorium on H5N1 Bioengineering Research: What Was It For? What Did It Accomplish?
Email to David Malakoff, December 26, 2012
H5N1 (“bird flu”) is an especially deadly strain of influenza that could pose a huge human health risk if it ever acquired the ability to spread easily in humans – which so far it has not done. But in early 2012 a controversy arose over research aimed at bioengineering a new kind of H5N1 that would be more readily transmissible in mammals. The debate focused on the potential value of the research (for example, it might help scientists better understand how to stop H5N1 from becoming transmissible) versus its potential risks (an accident or an intentional release might launch an H5N1 pandemic). While the debate raged, a voluntary moratorium on similar research was instituted, while scientists, policymakers, and interested citizens tried to thrash out how this sort of research should be regulated. By the end of 2012, new rules had been proposed and the moratorium was pretty obviously about to end. That’s when David Malakoff of Science contacted me for comment on what I thought the moratorium had accomplished. His January 4, 2013 story used only one quotation from the email I sent him in response. Both David’s story and my email to him are linked here.
A German translation of my email to David, somewhat edited, was posted January 19, 2013 on the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and published in that newspaper’s January 20, 2013 print issue.
German translation available
In der Deutschen: Forschung mit Vogelgrippe-Virus: Reine Augenwischerei
The Science article and my email to David Malakoff are located on this site.
The German translation is located off this site.This article is categorized as:
Il processo dell’Aquila agli scienziati dei terremoti e il rischio della fuga
Published in Corriere della Sera, October 22, 2012
Convicting and Maybe Imprisoning Scientists for Bad Risk Communication: Italy’s L’Aquila Earthquake
Emails to Anna Meldolesi, October 16 and October 22, 2012
In April 2009, a powerful earthquake devastated the Italian city of L’Aquila and surrounding villages. The quake had been preceded by a “swarm” of tremors, which many townspeople interpreted as a warning. So a panel of experts was invited to L’Aquila to assess the evidence and try to reassure the populace. The news conference that concluded the panel’s deliberations was indeed reassuring – excessively reassuring. As a result, six scientists and one government official were tried for manslaughter after the quake, and in October 2012 they were convicted – a rare and perhaps unprecedented case of imposing prison sentences on scientists for doing bad risk communication. In response to emails from Anna Meldolesi of Corriere della Sera, my wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I wrote two sets of comments on the case, some of which Anna used in her October 22 story. Both Anna’s story and our emails to her are linked above.
The Corriere della Serra article is located off this site.
The file with my two emails (with Jody Lanard) to Anna Meldolesi is located on this siteThis article is categorized as:
Report: Complacency, misperception stymie quest for better flu vaccines
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), October 15, 2012
A game-changing approach to investigating flu vaccines
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), October 15, 2012
Email to Lisa Schnirring, October 14, 2012
On October 15, 2012, a University of Minnesota research organization issued a report on “The Compelling Need for Game-Changing Influenza Vaccines,”
arguing that the current flu vaccine is sorely inadequate, that a key barrier to developing a better vaccine is the widespread judgment that the current one is fine, and that the main reason the vaccine’s effectiveness is so consistently overestimated is that public health officials keep saying it is better than it is. I served on an Expert Advisory Group that helped with the research. A few days before the report was released, Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News emailed me three questions. Bits of my response were included in two October 15 articles that Lisa coauthored with Robert Roos. But neither article addressed a key point I made in my answers: that public health officials aren’t just accidently mistaken about flu vaccine effectiveness; in their zeal to encourage people to get vaccinated, they are sometimes intentionally dishonest. Both CIDRAP News articles and my email to Lisa are linked above. The two CIDRAP News articles are located off this site.
My email to Lisa Schnirring is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
2 years after Gulf oil spill, Louisiana seafood still battling negative perception
Published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 19, 2012
Why Do Many People Still Refuse to Eat Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico?
Email to Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, April 17, 2012
Reporter Ben Bloch of the New Orleans Times-Picayune emailed me about a story he was writing on why many people were put off Gulf seafood by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – so much so that now, two years later, 30% of the respondents in a recent survey said they were still apprehensive. This is the response I sent him. He used only a little of it in his story, not including my suggestion that officials might have been too quick and too keen to tell people there was no problem. But he did find a lot of other good material on the psychology of stigma in such situations.
The Benjamin Alexander-Bloch article is located off this site.
My email to Benjamin Alexander-Bloch is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
H1N1 cases in India sparking media hype
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), April 9, 2012
India’s Response to Swine Flu – Still Weird
Email to Lisa Schnirring, April 9, 2012
When CIDRAP News decided to do a story about recent hype in India’s media coverage of swine flu, I pointed out that it wasn’t just recent and it wasn’t just the media. So reporter Lisa Schnirring asked if I wanted to comment on the record. This is the response I sent her. She used most of it in her story, along with a lot of other good material on Indian pandemic H1N1 hype.
This Lisa Schnirring article is located off this site.
My email to Lisa Schnirring is located on this site.These articles are categorized as:
Markets in Transition: Managing Outrage, Icky Pallets, Safety Issues at the Plant and Looking Ahead
Posted on the website of Pallet Enterprise, April 1, 2012
In the ongoing war between the wood and plastics industries, each side likes to accuse the other of manufacturing a dangerous product. One front in this war focuses on the pros and cons of wooden pallets versus plastic pallets. And apparently one of the arguments against wooden pallets is that the wood may be treated with hazardous chemicals or contaminated with bacteria, and may transfer the chemicals or bacteria to food that is stored on wooden pallets. It’s an issue I have never worked on. But this article by Rick LeBlanc does a good job of applying basic principles of outrage management to the wooden pallet food risk controversy.
This file is located off this site.
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WHO H5N1 study group extends moratorium, calls for full publication
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), February 17, 2012
The H5N1 Debate Needs Respectful Dialogue, Not “Education” or One-Sided Advocacy
Email to Lisa Schnirring, February 17, 2012
When laboratory researchers succeeded in creating a potentially pandemic strain of bird flu, a U.S. government agency recommended editing out methodological details before the two papers were published. Others suggested the research should never have been done and should not be pursued. The result was a pitched battle over what limits, if any, should be put on research and publication. The World Health Organization responded in part with a two-day meeting of public health officials and flu experts. At the end of the meeting the group announced some recommendations of its own. Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News asked for my comments, so I sent her an email – parts of which she used in her story on the WHO meeting.
This Lisa Schnirring article is located off this site.
My email to Lisa Schnirring is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Flu vaccine efficacy: Time to revise public messages?
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), November 4, 2011
Overselling Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Risks Undermining Public Health Credibility
Email to Robert Roos, October 27, 2011
On October 25, 2011, a team led by Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota published a meta-analysis of prior research on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, showing it to be less effective than public health officials and experts have usually claimed. In the resulting media coverage, many in public health said the Osterholm paper wasn’t really surprising and denied that flu vaccine effectiveness has been routinely oversold. So Jody Lanard and I made a case that it was still being oversold, focusing particularly on two very recent updates on the CDC website, and emailed it to Robert Roos of CIDRAP News. Bob interviewed public health professionals about what we said and put together a November 4 story called “Flu vaccine efficacy: Time to revise public messages?” There’s no question mark in the title we’re giving our email: “Overselling Flu Vaccine Effectiveness Risks Undermining Public Health Credibility.”
This Robert Roos article is located off this site.
Our email to Robert Roos is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
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Broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio, October 25, 2011
In October 2011, Lancet Infectious Diseases published a new statistical analysis of the literature on flu vaccine effectiveness, showing that the vaccine is less effective than most patients, most doctors, and even many state and local health departments have believed. Lorna Benson of Minnesota Public Radio included some comments from me in her story on the new study. I emphasized that flu vaccine experts have known for some years that the vaccine doesn’t work as well as they wish, but have been reluctant to say so very publicly, fearing that candor about the vaccine’s low efficacy might dissuade some people from getting vaccinated or getting their kids vaccinated. (Lorna reported that some actual flu vaccine experts told her the same thing, but refused to be named.) I argued that the bigger risk was that people who discovered that flu vaccine effectiveness had been systematically hyped might start to worry – logically but I think mistakenly – that perhaps public health officials can’t be trusted on vaccine safety either. That may be why the CDC recently snuck in a downward revision of the assessment of flu vaccine efficacy on its own website, belatedly acknowledging the truth about the vaccine – but still not acknowledging the truth about its prior hype.
The news story (broadcast and print versions) is located off this site.
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Broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio, April 27, 2011
Talking about the Vaccination-Autism Connection … to Somali Parents of Autistic Children(Note: This link launches an MP3 audio file (57MB, 35 min.) on this site.)Lorna Benson of Minnesota Public Radio asked if she could interview me about a long-brewing controversy between the Somali community in Minnesota and state health officials over the high rate of autism among Somali children in Minnesota and the resurgence of measles in the Somali community because many Somali parents suspect a connection and choose not to vaccinate their kids. The 35-minute radio interview took place on April 27. It focused on ways I though the Minnesota Department of Health might deal more empathically with Somali concerns – and, more generally, on my criticism of the public health establishment for sometimes sounding more deeply committed to defending the safety of the MMR vaccine than to vaccinating kids against measles or seeking an answer to the riddle of autism. Lorna’s story ended up focusing mostly on a Minnesota “vaccination awareness forum” that had also taken place on April 27; toward the end of the story she linked some of my interview comments to some of what she had heard at the forum.
The news story (broadcast and print versions) is located off this site.
The interview audio file is located on this site.This article is categorized as:
Is This the Poster Food for a Radiation Menace?
Published in The New York Times, April 12, 2011, p. D5
Denise called me on April 8 to ask why nearly every nuclear expert she interviewed about the risk of eating food contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima power plants kept talking about bananas. The point of such comparisons, I told her, is to belittle people’s fears about low levels of radioactivity by picking a comparator that will make them feel stupid for worrying – something we eat routinely without knowing it has radioactive ingredients. I emphasized that minimizing comparisons usually backfire, especially in the middle of a crisis – not just because they’re pompous and condescending, but also because people can sense that the source’s goal is to (over)reassure them rather than to inform and guide them.
This file is located off this site.
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In Defense of Iodine Snatchers
Posted on the Turnstyle website, April 1, 2011
On March 23, Charlie Foster posted an article for “Turnstyle” (an online information service by and for adults 18–34) on some of the ways the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government have fostered mistrust in their handling of the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis. It was based entirely on his phone interview with me. On April 1, Charlie posted this second article, based on the same interview. This one focuses on why I think people who seek out potassium iodide shouldn’t be belittled as stupid, as hoarders, or as panicking.
This file is located off this site.
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- Risk Communication Formula: Avoid Half-Truths, Manage
the OutragePublished in PR News, March 14, 2011
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Scott Van Camp’s article is a brief summary of my approach to risk communication, especially outrage management (which Scott – like most PR people – insists on calling “crisis communication”). The article is noteworthy mainly for the skeptical interest shown by the PR people Scott interviewed about my approach. As Scott points out near the start of the article, “Sandman has built a successful crisis career on imparting risk strategies and tactics that have resonated with clients, although they have never taken full flight within PR.” I have also posted our 50-minute March 10 telephone interview (“Outrage Management: A Tough Paradigm for Public Relations to Swallow”). Anticipating the likely thrust of the article, I devoted a lot of the interview to the difficulties PR people have with outrage management.
The audio file and the PDF (642kB) are located on this site.
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Published in the March 2011 issue of Intellectual Property Magazine, pp. 20–22
Maura O’Malley of Intellectual Property Magazine asked if she could interview me for an article on “management of reputations online” – particularly on how the rise of social media had affected the way companies manage (or should manage) reputational crises. In the 40-minute telephone interview that resulted, I argued that it has always been a mistake for companies to ignore, patronize, or attack their critics instead of being responsive. The growth of social media has made this mistake much more obvious and much more damaging, I said; even the most recalcitrant companies are beginning to learn the lesson. We also talked about the role of lawyers (the magazine’s main audience) in reputational controversies, plus some other topics.
Maura’s article, entitled “Reputation 3.0,”
is posted on this site with permission.This audio file and the PDF (357kB) are located on this site.
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Introduction to Outrage Management
Posted on the pearltrees website, January 6, 2011
Rusty Cawley is a seasoned public relations professional who got interested in my approach to outrage management in 2001. As he explains on his “Outrage 2.0 Blog,” he decided in 2011 to take a stab at “connecting the dots” in my “sprawling” website using pearltrees software to organize some of what I’ve written about outrage management. (He doesn’t touch precaution advocacy and crisis communication at all.) If you’re looking for an organized entrée to outrage management and the structure of this website doesn’t do the job for you, check out Rusty’s restructure and see what you think.
This structure is located off this site.
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Carnival Cruises Must Bail Out Its Image
Published in Marketing Daily, November 15, 2010 (posted on the Marketing Daily website November 14, 2010)
As the crippled cruise ship Carnival Splendor limped home to San Diego after an engine room fire, I followed the story casually, noticing that Carnival management seemed to be handling the communication fairly well. Then Tanya Irwin of Marketing Daily left me a phone message asking me to email her a few paragraphs of comment. So I checked out the coverage a little more carefully, confirmed my impression, and sent her a brief response (“Carnival Manages to Avoid Defensiveness about Its Crippled Cruise Ship”). The published article uses some of what I said, including my suggestion that Carnival might have made better use of the risk communication seesaw.
This file is located off this site. My original email is posted on this site.
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Posted on the Newsweek website, August 5, 2010
This website article reviews the mixed and highly uncertain evidence on whether cell phones give people cancer, quoting me briefly on why so few people are worried about the possibility. Because people love their cell phones, I argue, they use the uncertainty of the studies as an excuse not to worry. My longer answer to Sharon’s emailed question (“Why aren’t people more worried about cell phone health risks?”) is posted in this website’s Guestbook. It points out why people are far likelier to worry about cell phone towers than the phones themselves.
This file is located off this site.
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Solicited letter to the editor, London Evening Standard, June 4, 2010
On June 3, the London Evening Standard published a piece by City Editor Chris Blackhurst urging everybody to “Stop putting the boot into BP – we need it to survive.” The editors asked me to write a response for the next day’s paper. So I wrote one, agreeing with Blackhurst that vilifying BP is unwise and in some ways unfair, then pointing out some other ways I think the vilification is justified. I don’t know if the response was published (the Evening Standard website doesn’t include letters), but here it is.
This file is located on this site.
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Communicating about the BP Oil Spill: What to Say; Who Should Talk
Posted on Daily Kos, May 30, 2010
On May 29, one of the editors of the popular left-leaning blog Daily Kos, who goes under the nom-de-Web “DemFromCT,” wrote to ask my views on two risk communication aspects of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: What should the sources be saying about the likely future course of the spill, and who should do the talking. He quoted liberally from my response in his May 30 post, entitled “Risk Communication and Disasters: Just Tell the Truth.” He also posted my whole response at the end of his piece. I focused mostly on telling the whole truth, avoiding over-reassurance, and letting everybody talk instead of trying to “speak with one voice.”
My response is located on this site.
DemFromCT’s complete post (including my response) and
a wide range of reader comments are located off this site.This article is categorized as:
Swine Flu Pandemic Communication Challenges and Lessons Learned
Responses to emailed questions from Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News
On April 21, 2010, Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News (part of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota) wrote me that she was working on an article on communications challenges and lessons learned from the swine flu pandemic – one of a series of CIDRAP News retrospectives to mark the first anniversary of the emergence of the new H1N1 virus. Would my wife and colleague Jody Lanard and I like to be interviewed? I replied that if she would email us some questions, we would answer in writing. No article ever materialized, but here are Lisa’s questions and our answers.
This file is located on this site.
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BBC Radio 4 interview with Peter M. Sandman, broadcasted on the “PM” newscast, May 3, 2010
On May 3 I did a brief interview with BBC Radio on risk communication aspects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the interview was prerecorded, to my surprise they used the whole thing. This page has the link to the MP3 file with the interview. It also has a summary of what I said and what else I’d have liked to say.
This file and the audio file (3MB, 4 min.) are located on this site.
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Risk perception and water fluoridation support and opposition in Australia
Published in Journal of Public Health Dentistry, vol. 70, 2010, pp. 58–66
I belatedly “found” this 2010 journal article in 2018 – one of just a handful of published research articles making use of my hazard-versus-outrage distinction. The authors’ objective was “to determine whether risk perceptions reflecting various ‘outrage’ factors are associated with water fluoridation support and opposition.” Their answer was yes: “An overall outrage index computed from the 16 significant outrage factors accounted for a statistically significant 58 percent of the variance in water fluoridation stance.” And they concluded that “efforts to mitigate the level of public outrage, rather than continuing to deny possible hazards, may offer a worthwhile strategy in gaining public acceptance for the extension of water fluoridation.” Similar analyses of the mobile telephone controversy (1997) and the vaccination controversy (2006)
are also on this website.This is an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file, 150kB, located on this site.
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Posted on the Vivian Krause’s “Fish Farm Fuss”
Vivian Krause is a former employee of the farmed fish industry and now a citizen activist on behalf of fish farming, and against what she sees as an unfair campaign by many environmental groups on behalf of wild fish. She is also extremely interested in outrage management. For several years now she has tried to help the farmed fish industry listen better and respond better to the outrage of its critics. She understands how difficult industry finds that task, because she finds it difficult herself, lapsing periodically into venting her own outrage at the critics instead. In 2006 I posted a set of Vivian’s PowerPoint slides on “Risk Communication for Salmon Aquaculture.”
This new slide set makes no mention of the fish-farming industry. It is also revised in other ways. I don’t always agree with the details of Vivian’s interpretations of my work. But she makes it simple, keeps it interesting, feels it deeply, and gets it mostly right. This is an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file,
11 MB, located off this site.This article is categorized as:
European hearing airs WHO pandemic response, critics’ charges
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), January 26, 2010
Charges that the World Health Organization (WHO) exaggerated the risk of the H1N1 pandemic in collusion with drug companies came to a head in a January 26 hearing of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Social, Health and Family Affairs. Lisa Schnirring covered the story for CIDRAP News. While she was working on her article, I sent her an email offering some comments. My wife and colleague Jody Lanard did so as well (at Lisa’s request), and Lisa wound up quoting us both – Jody mostly on the normal antipathy between WHO and Big Pharma and thus the irony of the conflict-of-interest charge; and me mostly on WHO’s failure to concede two valid charges among the invalid ones: that WHO hadn’t sufficiently acknowledged the pandemic’s mildness and that WHO had dropped severity from its characterization of flu pandemics at the last minute.
After Lisa’s article was published, Jody and I decided to expand my email to document more thoroughly the two valid charges, the risk communication case for acknowledging them, and WHO’s failure to do so. The resulting critique (“It’s Not a Fake Pandemic – but WHO’s Defense Lacks Candor”) is a lot tougher on WHO than the CIDRAP News article.
This file is located off this site. Our critique is posted on this site.
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Why Seniors Really Should Fear Swine Flu
Blogged on the Newsweek website, January 8, 2010
I continue to be surprised that the mainstream media have paid so little attention to the CDC’s evidence that children are actually less at risk of catching a deadly case of swine flu than adults and seniors – and so little attention to the CDC’s decision not to change its vaccination messaging in response to that evidence. Even after I posted a Swine Flu Pandemic Communication Update on the subject, I was unable to arouse much of a reaction. This excellent blog post by Newsweek’s science editor is an exception … or perhaps a watershed. Starting from my update, Sharon Begley nailed the evidence that seniors are being dangerously misled into thinking they’re too old to worry about swine flu.
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December 18, 2009
On December 2, 2009, and again on December 15, I criticized the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in my “Swine Flu Pandemic Communication Update” for (in my view) intentionally misinterpreting its own data on the severity of the swine flu pandemic and on which age cohorts were most at risk. These criticisms aroused surprisingly little media interest. But a couple of reporters did call for interviews. Here are some excerpts from my side of one telephone interview. No story based on this interview ever materialized. The details are no longer of much interest, except as a pristine case study of successful CDC dishonesty.
This is a link to page with links to the audio MP3 files, located on this site.
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Broadcast on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” November 6, 2009
The CDC website has detailed advice for parents with a child home sick with swine flu. But it’s not necessarily very practical or user-friendly advice. Deborah Franklin’s story on NPR’s “Morning Edition” features some of the ways the CDC’s recommendations might be a tad unrealistic. She used me to say the obvious: that there’s nothing wrong with telling parents how to achieve maximum infection control at home, but it would help to offer a Plan B for parents who can’t or won’t do it all. The link includes both the audio clip and a print version of the story from NPR’s website. Available on this site: An email I sent the reporter (“Prioritizing among Precautions: The Best Is the Enemy of the Good”) before the interview with some thoughts on public health professionals’ reluctance to help people prioritize among their recommended precautions.
This file is located off this site. My original email is located on this site.
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Broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” November 2, 2009
Richard Knox interviewed me for nearly an hour on how I think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should speak to people who aren’t just worried about the safety of the swine flu vaccine, but are also mistrustful of government and not inclined simply to take the CDC’s word that the vaccine is safe. I talked a lot about the sorts of accountability mechanisms smart corporations use, and how the CDC could use similar approaches if it weren’t so deeply offended by people’s mistrust. The resulting story in “All Things Considered” used only a little of the interview, of course. The link includes both the audio clip and a print version of the story from NPR’s website.
This file and the audio file are located off this site.
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Sorting through panic and anxiety
Published in the Toronto Star, October 30, 2009
When a healthy 13-year-old soccer player in Toronto suddenly got swine flu and died, both major Toronto newspapers ran front-page stories urging people not to panic. Until then, public health authorities had been desperately trying to get people to take the pandemic seriously enough; now they reversed direction and started making reassuring statements. Instead of seizing the teachable moment, they succumbed to their own “fear of fear.” Judy Gerstel of the Toronto Star called me to ask about the mixed messages. The resulting story suffers a bit from ham-handed editing – but it is still on target.
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Uncertainty over H1N1 warranted, experts say
Published in the Toronto Star, October 9, 2009
I’ve pretty much stopped posting news stories that quote me about pandemic risk communication, since neither the stories nor the quotes say much that’s new. But this Toronto Star “Analysis” story by Judy Gerstel swims against the tide. Like many other stories, this one covers official uncertainty about many aspects of the swine flu pandemic. It focuses particularly on an unpublished Canadian study that seems to show the seasonal flu vaccine might increase vulnerability to the pandemic virus, which has led to significant changes in some provinces’ vaccination policies despite contrary (also unpublished) studies. But instead of criticizing the uncertainty as official “double messages” leading to public “confusion,” Judy praises it as “transparency, responsiveness, agility and acknowledgement of uncertainty.” I was pleased to be part of the story. (I’m also in a less interesting Judy Gerstel swine flu story published the same day, “Swine flu squeezing out the seasonal bug,” which despite its headline actually focuses on what to call the pandemic virus.)
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British public slow to respond to pandemic
Posted on Emerging Health Threats Forum, July 16, 2009
A survey of pandemic attitudes in the U.K found people not very concerned and not very inclined to take precautions. Holly Else of the Emerging Health Threats Forum sent me an email asking what I thought of these results. I replied that they were unsurprising, since it often takes a generation to inculcate a new precaution in a society, especially with regard to a risk that isn’t obviously serious (yet). On the date this news story was being prepared, the U.K. had just experienced two pandemic deaths in previously healthy people (one of them a child), and the level of public anxiety was apparently higher than it was in early May, when the survey had been conducted – so I commented on that too, noting that a temporary adjustment reaction does not constitute panic. My original response (“It Isn’t Easy to Arouse Pandemic Concern. What Do We Need People to Know?”) is posted on this site. It also identified what I considered the three key things the U.K. public needed to know about the pandemic; that was a little beside the point and didn’t make it into the story.
This file is located off this site. My original email is posted on this site.
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WHO suspends reporting of H1N1 case counts
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), July 16, 2009
On July 16, the World Health Organization advised countries to stop routinely testing suspected pandemic flu cases to confirm the diagnosis. WHO’s main reason was to conserve laboratory resources better used for other purposes, once widespread community transmission has already been established. But there is also a risk communication angle to the story. The tally of confirmed cases is a much smaller number than the actual number of people who have had the disease. As I explained to Lisa Schnirring of CIDRAP News, overuse of the confirmed case count has given many people the misimpression that the pandemic is much less pervasive than it actually is, and has made sources who tried to explain its actual pervasiveness sound like fear-mongers. The emphasis on confirmed cases has also made the disease look more deadly than it actually is (so far), since the unconfirmed cases are missing from the denominator of the “case fatality rate” fraction.
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Critics say “mild” a misleading term for H1N1
Distributed by Canadian Press, June 28, 2009
Canadian Press reporter Helen Branswell (the dean of the pandemic press corps) sent me an email asking my opinion on all the official statements that pandemic H1N1 is “mild” and that it attacks mostly people with “underlying health conditions.” I wrote back that both claims are accurate but misleading. When applied to a flu pandemic, “mild” doesn’t mean what we think it does, and an awful lot of people have “underlying health conditions.” And anyway, why were officials trying so hard to reassure the public, when the real problem was public complacency? Helen used only a little of my email in her article. My original email to Helen (“Is Swine Flu “Mild”? Are We Safe If We Have No “Underlying Conditions”?”) is posted on this site.
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Communication expert endorses WHO’s delay on pandemic declaration
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), June 12, 2009
On June 11, the World Health Organization finally let the other shoe drop, formally declaring H1N1 a pandemic. CIDRAP’s Robert Roos sent me an email asking for my comments. I responded that the delay itself had been pretty sensible – which turned into Bob’s lead angle. But I had mixed feelings about some of what Director-General Margaret Chan and Interim Assistant Director-General Keiji Fukuda said in making the announceoverhyment. What had motivated WHO to delay in the first place had been its twin concerns that the declaration might frighten people unduly (“Oh my God a pandemic!”) and that the declaration might reinforce people’s complacency (“This is a pandemic? What’s the big deal?”). Yet the announcement did relatively little to address either concern. My original exchange of emails with Bob Roos (“Reactions to the WHO’s Phase 6 Declaration”) is posted on this site.
This file is located off this site. My original email is located on this site.
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We’re Living in a Pandemic: Now What Do We Do?
Blogged in Nancy Shute’s “On Parenting” blog, U.S. News & World Report, June 11, 2009
After WHO declared H1N1 a pandemic, Nancy Shute asked me what the declaration meant for how worried parents should be. I answered that it shouldn’t have any effect at all; the reasons to worry were just as compelling before the declaration as after, and the reasons to worry were mostly about what might happen, not what had happened so far. When the story appeared on Nancy’s “On Parenting” blog, it left the impression I thought there was little or no reason to worry, period. So I sent her a longer, more alarmist comment, entitled “Swine flu is more serious than many people think.”
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WHO under pressure from member states to rewrite pandemic requirement
Distributed by Canadian Press, May 22, 2009
For weeks, a number of governments have been urging the World Health Organization to redefine “pandemic” so it wouldn’t have to declare H1N1 a pandemic. Their main worry: that a pandemic declaration would panic their publics, leading to demands for border closings and other such ineffective and economically damaging infection control measures. On May 22, WHO announced that it would reconsider its pandemic definition. I thought the rationale for doing so was mistaken. But I saw some merit in the decision itself, for exactly the opposite reason: that a pandemic declaration while H1N1 remained mild would “teach” people that pandemics are no big deal. This CP story by Helen Branswell quotes me briefly to that effect. My original email to the reporter (“On WHO Changing the Definition of ‘Pandemic’”) is on this site.
This file and my original email are located on this site.
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Posted on newmatilda.com, May 12, 2009
I’m not sure what to say about this Australian website posting. Its tone is awfully flip. And author Jess Hill got some details wrong. (For example, she writes about my “‘Watch out! Stop Worrying’ approach” – which is actually two antithetical approaches.) Still, she really does seem to understand the dilemma WHO faces as it tries to warn people about a situation that looks quite mild at the moment. And she has condensed a lot of my website writing on pandemics into two risk communication strategies she thinks WHO is using with regard to swine flu: “Get Your Slice of the ‘Fearfulness Pie’” and “Use ‘Teachable Moments’ to Establish ‘The New Normal.’” Once I got past the tone, I found this short article a very thoughtful assessment.
By the way, Hill quotes me as saying that I have worked on over 500 crises. It’s an accurate quotation, but it’s not so. I have worked on over 500 controversies that felt like crises to my clients, because their reputations or their profitability was threatened – but far fewer actual crises that seriously threatened public health. Swine flu is one of the latter.
This file is located off this site.
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- Health Check
(Note: This link launches an MP3 audio file (7.9 MB, 8:30 min.) on his site.)Broadcast on BBC World Service, May 10–12, 2009
“Health Check” is a weekly program on BBC radio. This audio clip deals with people’s emotional reactions to swine flu. It starts with a report from Mexico City, followed with an interview with me. I point out that officials suffer from “panic panic,” excessively worried that the public will panic, but that in most crisis situations (this one included) apathy is a much bigger problem than panic. I also talk about the role of denial, and emphasize that what officials need to do is to legitimize people’s fears – not tell them they shouldn’t be afraid.
This is an audio MP3 file located on this site.
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H1N1 flu – are we preparing for the worst or hoping for a break?
Published in the Jamaica Observer, May 9, 2009
Jamaica Observer columnist Clare Forrester is the former Media and Communication Advisor of the Office of Caribbean Program Coordination of the Pan American Health Organization, where she worked with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. This is a thoughtful and level-headed column arguing that the swine flu threat is still serious, that officials need to be candid rather than over-reassuring, and that the real danger isn’t panic but apathy – and loss of trust if officials over-reassure and then things get bad. She interviewed Jody and looked at my website to get some additional quotes, but she had it right to start with.
This file is located on this site.
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Avoiding “warning fatigue” over swine flu
Posted on Emerging Health Threats Forum, May 8, 2009
Anita Makri of Emerging Health Threats Forum asked some of the most thoughtful questions I have been asked anywhere about the risk communication implications of the fact that swine flu has been mild so far, about what governments might have done differently in the way they warned people, about what they ought to be saying now, and about how to handle any future warnings that might be needed. She compiled my answers with answers from the CDC’s Barbara Reynolds into an excellent article on swine flu warning fatigue. This sentence from the article captures the problem best: “‘We need to persuade people who became alarmed (wisely) and then became less alarmed (also wisely) that they have nothing to feel foolish about and nothing to feel angry about … but good reason to remain vigilant,’ says Sandman.”
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Some more miscellaneous swine flu articles
One focus of week-two swine flu news coverage is the “hype” meme (or “overhype” – which I guess assumes a fair amount of hype is only natural). When interviewed on whether officials were fear-mongering, I try to stress two points: (a) that officials were right to warn about a serious risk that might not materialize; and (b) that the widespread conviction that the story was hyped will make it harder for officials to keep warning that we’re not out of the woods yet. Here are three examples (one quoting my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, not me).
H1N1 outbreak revealed seasonal flu lingered in Minn
This May 6 Minnesota Public Radio story by Lorna Benson covers my concern that authorities will hesitate to risk still more credibility by doing what they should do: warn people that swine flu may still pose a serious threat and that they should use the current calm to get better prepared. This site includes an audio file related to this article. (This article includes a link to an audio file.)
Flu overhyped? Some say officials ‘cried swine’
Unlike many stories on the widespread conviction that the swine flu risk was overblown by officials and the media, this May 7 Associated Press story by Lindsey Tanner and Mike Stobbe pays attention to why that conviction is mistaken. It quotes me – my website, actually – on how skeptical people are likely to be if things start looking bad again and officials try to renew their warnings.
This May 7 Haaretz article (from Israel) is more balanced than most media stories about “swine flu hype.” Reporter Assaf Uni interviewed my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, who pointed out that preparing isn’t panicking, and that it’s better to warn people about a risk that doesn’t materialize than to leave them unaware of one that does.
The first is located off site. The second two files are located on this site.
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Some miscellaneous swine flu articles
Only a small number of journalists are interested in swine flu risk communication – but most of that small number eventually find their way to me. Of the resulting stories, I’m posting the most interesting ones separately; I’m not posting the least interesting ones at all. Here are a few in the middle.
Behavioral research can help curb the spread of swine flu – but is anyone listening?
Michael Price wrote this April 30 feature for the American Psychological Association website, reporting some swine flu communication recommendations by me and Baruch Fischhoff.
This May 3 blog entry by “Artichoke” is only casually about swine flu; mostly it’s a summary of some of my old writing on hazard versus outrage, panic, and “panic panic,” as applied to everything from swine flu to education.
What happens if swine flu goes away?
This May 4 “Analysis” by Reuters Health and Science Editor Maggie Fox quotes me on my hope that “the government is more worried about the public being caught with its pants down than the government being called fear-mongers.”
Between a virus and a hard place
This editorial in the May 7 issue of Nature argues that “complacency, not overreaction,” is the greatest swine flu danger – and uses me to make the point that WHO and the CDC have actually done an excellent job of acknowledging how uncertain the experts are about the future course of this new virus.
Some of these files are located off this site.
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Broadcast on KUNC radio, May 5, 2009
Grace Hood made a mistake at the start of this four-minute interview when she said I told her some people are panicking about swine flu. And I overstated things pretty badly myself when I said that at the start of the outbreak the experts were “on the phone in the middle of the night” worrying that swine flu might be “the granddaddy of all pandemics.” Despite both errors, this is a pretty solid interview on two key points I keep stressing: (a) that a good pandemic warning needs to be simultaneously scary and tentative; and (b) that the U.S. government didn’t do much to urge people to prepare when it looked like a severe pandemic might be imminent, so it’s hard to imagine it’ll do more now that the sense of imminence has gone.
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5 Ways to Manage the Family’s Swine Flu
Blogged on the U.S. News & World Report website, May 1, 2009
Nancy Shute called to ask me about three things: whether parents should worry about their children in connection with swine flu, what they should do about it, and how they should talk to their kids about the situation. She really wanted to interview my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, but Jody’s in Asia and Nancy figured maybe a three-time father might be able to gin up some child-sensitive risk communication answers too. I tried. She captured what I said very well, I think, except that I didn’t say you should “sympathize” with a child’s legitimate swine flu worries; I said you should share them – not the same thing at all.
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Broadcast on PRI’s “The World” (National Public Radio), April 30, 2009
Long-time health journalist Christine Gorman and I chatted with host Lisa Mullins for about 20 minutes. PRI used about half of it. I spent a lot of my time riding my hobbyhorse that the government needs to do more to urge people to prepare in case a serious pandemic is around the corner. But Lisa got us talking about other things as well, notably why it doesn’t make a lot of sense to close the Mexican border when lots of people on this side of the border are already carrying the flu virus, while lots of trucks on the other side are carrying goods we need.
This is an audio MP3 file located on this site.
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Broadcast on BBC World Service “Business Daily,” April 29, 2009
This is only marginally about risk communication. The “Business Daily” reporter’s working hypothesis was that swine flu precautions – individual and societal – are excessive given how few people have died compared to the fatalities from many other risks (worker accidents, for example, not to mention the seasonal flu). I tried to explain that what’s scary about swine flu isn’t what has already happened; it’s what might (or might not) happen. It’s hard to choose precautions when the risk in question could end up catastrophic or trivial or anywhere in the middle. Going further and further beyond my field of expertise, I ended up explaining why I think dispersing antivirals nearer to population centers probably makes sense and closing airports probably doesn’t. The editors pretty much left my risk communication points on the cutting room floor (the psychological benefits of taking precautions, for example), and ran with my off-the-cuff amateur opinions about infection management. Not their fault, of course; I was the one answering the damn questions.
This is an audio MP3 file located on this site.
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Experts worry mild disease outside of Mexico hampers bid to get people to prepare
Distributed by Canadian Press, April 29, 2009
For days I have been haranguing Helen Branswell of Canadian Press (and everyone else I can buttonhole) about the need for officials to be simultaneously scary and tentative in what they tell the public about the swine flu pandemic that might (or might not) be impending. She eventually decided to do the story, pegged to the potentially misleading mildness of the non-Mexican cases so far. When she called to interview me, I also stressed the importance of urging people to undertake their own preparedness efforts, not just to watch the government prepare and practice good hygiene. And I criticized the government’s excessive fear of frightening the public. She managed to squeeze all three points into the story.
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WHO raises pandemic alert to phase 4
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), April 27, 2009
In the face of a very scary swine flu outbreak spreading from Mexico, the World Health Organization on April 27, 2009 did two things to its index of six pandemic phases: It implemented some changes in phase definitions (long in the works) that – among other effects – made the criteria for Phase 4 more demanding; and in spite of that it finally ratcheted up to Phase 4. Bob Roos of CIDRAP News sent me an email asking for comment on the likely impact of the latter change. His published article used some of what I said about my hope that the shift would signal organizations to trigger their pandemic plans and individuals to launch their own preparations. My original email (“Impacts of the WHO Ratchet from Pandemic Phase 3 to Phase 4”) is also on this site.
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More US swine flu cases, Mexico illnesses raise pandemic questions
WHO declares public health emergency as US swine flu cases rise
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), April 23 and April 25, 2009
When a potentially pandemic novel swine flu virus was discovered in North America in late April of 2009, I started writing a column on how the sources and the media were underplaying the story, failing to warn people sufficiently in large part because they were suffering from excessive “panic panic.” As the situation kept evolving, I got involved in trying to influence the sourcing and the coverage – and never finished the column. So all I have to share so far is brief quotations toward the end of two CIDRAP News articles by Lisa Schnirring. The first one criticizes the CDC for missing the teachable moment. The second one argues that it’s important to help people envision how bad things might (or might not) get.
For a complete rundown on what I think authorities should be saying right now (April 26, 2009) – written with Jody Lanard in March 2007, when we thought the virus in question would be “bird flu,” not “swine flu” – see “What to Say When a Pandemic Looks Imminent: Messaging for WHO Phases Four and Five.”
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Posted on the National Public Relations website, March 9, 2009
Canadian PR firm National Public Relations was one of the sponsors that brought me to Vancouver in March 2009 to give a two-day risk communication seminar (jointly with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard), organized by the University of British Columbia. As part of the event, the company taped this seven-minute interview with me on the basics of my “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula. The tape was posted (and labeled a “podcast”) on the National Public Relations website, and the link was emailed to conference participants and National Public Relations clients. It’s no longer on the National Public Relations site, so I have posted it here. If you prefer listening to reading, this is an okay introduction.
This audio file is located on this site.
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Cass Sunstein, Risk, Cost-Benefit and OHS
Posted on his “Safety-at-Work Blog,” January 26, 2009
Barack Obama’s selection of Cass Sunstein as the new U.S. “regulatory czar” prompted safety blogger Kevin Jones to republish his 2003 review of one of Sunstein’s books. In the review, Jones criticized Sunstein for ignoring my work on outrage in his approach to risk management. In fact, Sunstein has paid a lot of attention to outrage; he even coauthored a book about it (with risk guru Daniel Kahneman, not me). Sunstein will thus be the first top U.S. government official who has made significant contributions to the risk perception literature. So I posted a comment on Jones’s blog, citing some of Sunstein’s work and expressing my optimism about his appointment. I also took the opportunity to reflect briefly on the most difficult outrage-related challenge Sunstein will face: developing “a new, suppler set of not-quite-regulatory tools that can help ameliorate public outrage about risks that are more upsetting than they are dangerous.”
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Posted on his blog, January 20, 2009
A different version was published in The Age, January 20, 2009, under the title “Bad news must be told.”
The current economic meltdown is surely a crisis (high hazard, high outrage). And so the principles of crisis communication apply, including the crucial principle of leveling with people about bad news rather than feeding them over-reassuring half-truths. Unfortunately, most of those charged with responding to the world economic crisis don’t quite realize that crisis communication is a field. They’re making it up as they go along, and they rarely get it right. (I admit I’m not quite sure economics is a field; they seem to be making that up as they go along too.) It was a pleasure to see Peter Martin cite some of my work on behalf of candor about recession bad news – both the candor of the Australian government and his own candor in his economics writing for The Age, one of Australia’s leading newspapers.
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Denial near and far
Broadcast on PRI’s “The World,” November 21, 2008
Radio reporter Jason Margolis of “The World” attended a conference of global climate change skeptics, decided they were more deniers than actual skeptics, and ended up with a 10-minute story on climate change denial. I was one of several experts he quoted to explore the reasons why so many people have trouble facing the threat of global warming. In our interview, I focused on some ways activist communications may unwittingly encourage audience denial. Jason used the part on guilt – on why telling people their lifestyle is destroying the earth may not be the best way to inspire them to action. My views are elaborated further in a 2009 column on “Climate Change Risk Communication: The Problem of Psychological Denial.”
Link off-site to page with a link to this audio file
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Posted on the “Design Less Better” blog, November 17, 2008
The blog of a boutique design agency recently took on British Petroleum’s effort to rebrand itself as “beyond petroleum,” pointing out some of BP’s failures to live up to its environmental promises. Along the way, the entry quotes me as a BP PR advisor, implying that I helped with the rebranding. I have in fact given communication advice to BP over the years, but I think the rebranding promises far too much. I posted a comment on the blog noting that promising too much and performing too little are separate sins, and that it’s hard to distinguish the hypocrisy of an organization that’s pretending to change from the inconsistency of an organization that’s trying to change.
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What would you advise EnCana executives?
Posted on her “PR Perspective” blog, November 5, 2008
Canadian public relations practitioner Cindy Stephenson made good use of my thinking in this blog post on three recent attempts to blow up EnCana Corporation sour gas pipelines near Dawson Creek, B.C. But she didn’t really address what I see as a key issue in all cases of eco-terrorism: Should the company take any of the blame for attracting the terrorists’ ire and leaving them convinced that a nonviolent response would be useless? So I sent a response to her blog briefly discussing that issue, in terms of the risk communication seesaw.
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Study: Media can distort public’s views on infectious diseases
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), November 5, 2008
CIDRAP’s Lisa Schnirring asked me to comment on a new research paper showing that students take infectious diseases that have been much-covered in the media more seriously than diseases that have had less media attention. The paper’s authors interpreted this as evidence that media coverage distorts people’s perceptions of infectious diseases. I thought it was likelier that some characteristics of some infectious diseases – such as the potential to launch a pandemic! – rightly make them a bigger concern for both the media and the public than diseases without those characteristics. I sent Lisa a fairly blistering critique (“The Media and the Public Are Right to Pay More Attention to Avian Flu than to Yellow Fever!”) of the paper. She toned it down in what she published.
The title file is located off this site. My response is located on this site.
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Oilsands the poster child of bad oil
Published in the Calgary Herald, November 2, 2008
I appear only in the last four paragraphs of this long article on the escalating controversy over the environmental impacts of oilsands development, making the point that people tend to worry less about the environment when the economy sours. Bad economic times are thus a good time for embattled companies and industries to make their case.
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Businesses urged to avoid pandemic planning pitfalls
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), October 9, 2008
CIDRAP’s Michael Osterholm asked me to join him in hosting an October 9 webinar entitled “Avoiding the Big 7 Pandemic-Planning Mistakes: How Set-to-Survive Companies Sidestep These Missteps.” I focused on two of the mistakes/missteps – fearing to frighten stakeholders and failing to involve employees – and commented on the other five. I also contributed my depressing judgment that pandemic planners need to plan to be islands of preparedness.
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Framing vaccines, revisited: The “empathy” gambit
Posted on “The ScienceBlogs Book Club,” October 7, 2008
There has been a lot of discussion of Paul Offit’s new book, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure –a thorough rebuttal of the claim that vaccinations cause autism. The discussion on “The ScienceBlogs Book Club” led to an offshoot, a post by “Orac” criticizing my view that vaccination proponents (including Dr. Offit) would be more effective if they practiced better risk communication. Orac is particularly angry at two positions I have taken: (1) that proponents would be wiser to acknowledge the few valid arguments and accurate factoids that vaccination critics use, rather than ignoring or disparaging them – that claiming to be 99% right works better than claiming to be 100% right; and (2) that proponents would be wiser to show more empathy for people who still worry about a possible vaccination/autism link – for example, by acknowledging that it was a setback in the fight against autism when the hypothesized connection between autism and thimerosal in vaccines turned out to be a blind alley. Orac doesn’t really seem to disagree with me that vaccination proponents should be more empathic, though he fervently disagrees with my example. As for acknowledging the other side’s good points, he agrees that that’s a good idea too – but he’s enraged that I don’t think proponents are doing it already. Some of the follow-up discussion of Orac’s post is off-topic, but much is worth reading. Orac later reposted his comment on his own blog, “Respectful Insolence,” where it attracted quite different comments.
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PR pro advice costs Tories $35K
Published in the Calgary Herald, May 25, 2008
I think reporter Kelly Cryderman set out to write an article on how the Alberta government was spending big bucks on a U.S. spin doctor. But she did her homework, and ended up with a good, short piece on the provincial government’s effort to learn how to be more responsive in its communications about oil sands controversies. Of course the headline writer stuck to the big bucks focus, missing the point (which Cryderman got) that outrage management isn’t identical with public relations.
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Climate Risk Communication: TreeHugging Amidst The Outrage Industries
Posted on the www.treehugger.com website, September 12, 2007
As the name implies, TreeHugger is a green discussion board. John Laumer’s thread in its “Business + Politics” section addresses environmentalists’ various frustrations at the communication challenges of global climate change, and applies some of what I have written about risk communication (and especially about precaution advocacy) to those frustrations. The comments at the bottom may also turn out interesting (or not – it’s too soon to tell).
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Published in ICIS Chemical Business, and on its website, September 3, 2007
Clay Boswell started out wanting to write a “profile” for the chemical industry trade journal he works for, but the article turned out less a profile than a summary of the basics of risk communication, especially outrage management. It’s a good summary, I think. The original title was “Sandman says outrage is the key to community relations,” but I like how the piece got retitled on the website: “Sandman says.” Period.
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Delay in cancer information tarnishes state Health Department image
Broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio, June 22, 2007
The Minnesota Department of Health withheld data on lung cancer deaths among taconite miners for over a year, so when the story finally came out in June 2007, people were predictably outraged. Health Department explanations that it was waiting to develop an action plan didn’t quell the storm, nor did critics take well to Commissioner Dianne Mandernach’s explanation that people would have been too likely to overreact if the department had released the data without a plan. Actually, as I tried to explain to reporter Lorna Benson in this follow-up story, people tend to overreact most when they find out the authorities have been keeping secrets. (See “When to Release Risk Information: Early – But Expect Criticism Anyway.”) Withholding urgently needed information, I told her, is unforgivable; withholding comparatively routine information is foolish, precisely because when it’s finally unearthed it will seem more pivotal than it really was. Mandernach’s apology wasn’t bad, I said, except for a pledge to “maintain” the department’s credibility and “preserve” its reputation; “restore” would have been a much better word to choose. (The audio isn’t available online; this links to the print version of the story posted by Minnesota Public Radio.)
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If the Unexpected Happens … Who You Gonna Call? Crisis Busters
If the Unexpected Happens … (page 2) Published in The Age, “Business Day,” June 16, 2007, pp. 1, 6
This article on crisis communication from Australia’s number one newspaper covers the basics of what author Vanessa Burrow calls “crisis communication” (in my terms it’s mostly outrage management). The article also includes a handful of brief Australia case studies, and a summary of my “tech specs” for forgiveness. I really enjoyed the cartoon. (The front-page version was originally in color.) Vanessa initially emailed me a list of seven questions; I answered the ones on the role of apology in crisis situations, on organizations’ preparedness for crises, and on how Australia’s AWB controversy might have played out if the company had shown contrition. I have posted the original questions and answers (“The Role of Apologizing in Crisis Situations, Organizational Preparedness for Reputational Crises, and How an Apology Might Have Affected Australia’s AWB Controversy”) on this website.
These are Adobe Acrobat (pdf) files,
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Managing Outrage and Crises: Dealing with Risk by Understanding Your Audience
Published in Food Technology News (Guelph Food Technology Centre), June 2007
Over the past year I have given a presentation and a seminar at the Guelph Food Technology Centre in Guelph, Ontario. This article by Cliona Reeves is adapted from bits and pieces of the two. It focuses on the distinction among precaution advocacy (high-hazard, low-outrage), outrage management (low-hazard, high-outrage), and crisis communication (high-hazard, high-outrage). I have written about this distinction myself, particularly in “Four Kinds of Risk Communication.” But this article adds value in that it’s a little more detailed, a little more current, and particularly focused on food examples. The “quotations” in the article are actually mostly paraphrases, but Cliona checked with me before publication and they do capture my meaning, if not always my exact words.
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Physician survey shows mixed views on pandemic risk
Posted on the website of CIDRAP News (Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota), June 6, 2007
This is a news report about a survey of European physicians, focusing on their estimates of the probability of a flu pandemic “in the next few years.” Slightly more than half thought it wasn’t very likely. The survey results were interpreted by the authors as indicating that the respondents weren’t as concerned as they ought to be. That might be true for all I know – but it’s not necessarily complacent to think a pandemic is inevitable sooner or later, while doubting that it’s imminent. In fact, I told the reporter, it’s a huge mistake to ground the case for pandemic preparedness in the hunch that it’s coming soon, rather than in the well-founded conviction that it’s coming. I expanded on this point in an email (Inevitable versus Imminent: Interpreting a Pandemic Attitude Survey) to the reporter.
The title file is located off this site. My response is located on this site.
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How much risk do you live with?
Published in the Vancouver Sun, March 9, 2007
Once a month or so I get interviewed for a newspaper article on risk perception. The articles all cover the same ground: “The scary risks aren’t necessarily the ones that kill you. Here are some stunning examples. And here’s why the experts say we’re so foolish.” I don’t usually bother to post these articles. But this one struck me as unusually well done. It also focuses a lot on a hypothesis that most such articles ignore: risk homeostasis – the notion that people want as much risk in their lives as they want, and therefore compensate for safety improvements by taking more risks. On the other hand, this article – like most – steadfastly ignores a point I made to the reporter (as I always do): It isn’t really foolish to consider “outrage factors” like voluntariness, morality, and trust relevant to how acceptable a risk is; it isn’t really sensible to ignore these factors and focus exclusively on mortality statistics.
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When Worlds Collide: During Crises, Sandman Says, Politics and Government Are Separate Spheres
Published in Impact (Public Affairs Council), January 2007
Despite its misleading title, this article by Alan Crawford deals with my views on the pros and cons of candor about embarrassing information. I argued that businesses should usually be aggressively candid, wallowing in apologies when they have messed up, because their most important audiences are attentive stakeholders who will find out anyway. Politicians, on the other hand, are often talking to the much more apathetic general public. Ignoring embarrassments sometimes works for them, so they get into bad habits that backfire when the public turns attentive.
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Published in Vaccine, vol. 24, 2006, pp. 3921–3928
This article assesses the controversy over whether the MMR vaccine might cause autism in terms of my list of outrage components, and offers some outrage-based recommendations for ways public health communicators could better address the controversy. Published in 2006, it is grounded in my 1993 book Responding to Community Outrage, and doesn’t reference any of my more recent writing on this website (on the vaccination/autism controversy or on outrage management generally). Nor, of course, does it reference recent developments in the controversy itself. A similar analysis of the mobile telephone controversy, written by Simon Chapman and published in 1997, is also on this website.
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Published in ISHN Ezine (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), December 4 and December 8, 2006
Dave Johnson’s fascinating article on two quite different asbestos risk assessments produced by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration quotes me briefly on the risk communication implications of the story. When he sent me a draft for comment, Dave noted, “It’s got politics, greed, scandal, harassment, but no sex.” My complete response is also on this site.
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Internet rumours of bird flu case in Rimouski, Que., are ‘totally untrue’
Distributed by Canadian Press, November 29, 2006
Helen Branswell’s story focuses on the pros and cons of alarmist rumors, especially those found on the website of Henry Niman, a favorite site for people obsessed with pandemic risk. Helen didn’t use what I thought was the best line I gave her, so here it is: “Before the Internet the problem was getting information. Now the problem is vetting information.”
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Risk Communication for Salmon Aquaculture
Submitted to the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture, Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, November 24, 2006
After running across this website a year or so ago, Vivian Krause started corresponding with me about the risk communication implications of her various interests, including salmon farming and child adoption services. This PowerPoint presentation is her effort to persuade British Columbia legislators to take steps to manage people’s outrage over salmon farming, in addition to whatever they might decide to do to manage its environmental hazards. (You may also want to read the transcript
of Vivian’s actual testimony.) It is always a pleasure to see people make use of my work with regard to issues I know nothing about – especially when they “get it” as thoroughly as Vivian does.In February 2010, Vivian posted a new piece on her website, also based largely on my work, entitled “Why Salmon Farming Pushes People’s Buttons.”
This is a MicroSoft PowerPoint (.ppt) file
, 3.6 MB, located on this site.
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Lessons from Ground Zero: Risk Communication
Published in ISHN Ezine (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), September 21 and September 28, 2006
Dave Johnson sent me an email asking for my views on Ground Zero risk communication, particularly the hot controversy over whether authorities were too lackadaisical about personal protective equipment for rescue and recovery workers. I published his email and my response (“Telling 9/11 emergency responders to wear their masks – and explaining later what went wrong”) in my Guestbook. Johnson’s two-part column, based in part on my response, lists seven risk communication lessons from Ground Zero for occupational health and safety professionals.
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The Survivalist: How to Survive a Disaster
Posted on Slate, September 5, 2006
David Shenk has launched an eight-part series about disaster preparedness on Slate. The first part says some nice things about my website, and discusses the risk communication seesaw as a way of making his own preoccupation with catastrophe sound less paranoid.
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Published in The Australian, May 20, 2006
This is a postscript to the previous posting, which was a set of articles on my little corner of Australia’s AWB controversy. After publication of the “Draft Statement of Contrition” that AWB managers developed, based partly on my advice, a number of Australian newspapers and broadcast stations contacted me for interviews. They all wanted to ask about my work with AWB, so I declined to be interviewed. But Geoff Elliott said he’d stick to generic questions about what I normally advise companies who have attracted public outrage. So I talked to him. The resulting article is very short. But Elliott got my approach basically right. He even got right (not with my help) what virtually every other journalist on the story got wrong: that AWB’s draft statement was “an admission of moral responsibility, not an admission of guilt.”
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The Australian AWB Oil-for-Food Kickback Controversy
Various newspaper clippings, 2006
In 2006, I was a peripheral part of a huge controversy in Australia over kickbacks allegedly paid to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq through a company called AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board). AWB had asked (and not taken) my advice on how to handle the issue – and a government investigation made the advice public. The link is to a fuller explanation and to nine specific clips.
This introductory file is located on this site.
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Public Health and Risk Communication: A Brief Overview
Presented to a Chinese Government workshop on health and safety for the 2008 Winter Olympics, May 18, 2006
Roy Wadia, then a communication specialist at the World Health Organization in Beijing, developed this Microsoft PowerPoint® presentation in an effort to explain some key risk communication principles to Chinese officials preparing to host the 2008 Olympics. He based the presentation mostly on “Four Kinds of Risk Communication” on the handouts for “Crisis Communication: Guidelines for Action,” and on “The Flu Pandemic Preparedness Snowball.” The slides are in both English and Chinese. I don’t know how the Chinese officials in Roy’s audience responded to his talk, but they did post his slides.
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Skeptics warn bird flu fears are overblown
Posted on MSNBC.com, April 20, 2006
Subtitled “Chicken Little alert? Hysteria could sap money from worse health threats,” this article was part of an MSNBC package on pandemic flu. Reporter Rebecca Cook Dube warned me when she interviewed me that she was covering “the other side” — the people who claim the risk is overblown. My job was to represent the other side of the other side — to explain why a virus that has so far killed only a handful of people could nonetheless deserve to be taken seriously. I get awfully tired of this particular non sequitur; it’s as if somebody thought hurricane preparations were self-evidently pointless until the hurricane hit land and started claiming victims ... or self-evidently pointless so long as it remained debatable whether the hurricane would ever hit land at all. I tried to explain that people buy fire insurance not because they think it’s inevitable that their house will catch fire, and not because the fire is already raging, but because they think a fire is possible and could be devastating. Some of what I said about low-probability high-magnitude risks made it into the end of the story.
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Talking risk: avian flu advice from a risk communicator
Published in Food Chemical News, March 27, 2006, p. 29. Copyright © 2006 by Agra Informa, Inc. Posted with permission. For more information, go to www.foodchemicalnews.com.
Carole Sugarman of Food Chemical News interviewed me in March about how the poultry industry should talk about bird flu, as distinct from pandemic flu, and what I think industry spokespeople are doing wrong. I didn’t know the interview was actually published until a colleague sent me a copy in late April. Here it is. It’s a little incoherent. (I’d like to blame that on Carole’s note-taking, but it’s probably my burbling.) But the main points are clear enough, I think.
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Bird flu’s potential toll warrants alerts
Published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 17, 2006
This op-ed by the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argues that alerting people to the pandemic threat requires good risk communication. As his gold standard for good risk communication he cites principles I tried to urge on CDC during the anthrax attacks of 2001 (when he was its head) — pretty much the same principles covered in the crisis communication CD/DVD Jody Lanard and I produced a few years later. (The CD/DVD handouts are available on this site.) I had a couple of reactions to the op-ed that I sent to Jeff, and have posted excerpts from my email and his response.
The article and excerpts are on this site.
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The Bird Flu: How Much Fear Is Healthy?
Posted on TIME.com, March 15, 2006
Christine Gorman of Time has covered H5N1 since it appeared in Hong Kong in 1997. I figured our 15-minute telephone interview might turn into a paragraph in a roundup on the week’s bird flu news. Instead, she devoted this article to my views on the importance of warning people, of accepting that fear (not panic — that was her word) is the price of preparedness, of non-medical preparedness, of using survivors as volunteers, etc. It’s a short article that doesn’t say anything I haven’t said before. But it’s nice to see it on the Time website.
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Fear can play role in pandemic readiness, speaker says
Published on the website of the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy (CIDRAP), University of Minnesota, February 17, 2006
This article summarizes a speech I gave at CIDRAP’s groundbreaking Minneapolis conference, “Business Planning for Pandemic Influenza: A National Summit.” It focuses on two of the main points I made: that if you want to persuade people to take precautions you need to be willing to frighten them; and that frightening people shouldn’t mean claiming that a severe 1918-like pandemic is inevitable. (The probability is extremely high of a pandemic of unknown magnitude, I said; the probability is unknown of a pandemic of extremely high magnitude.)
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On Not Wanting to Know What Hurts You
Published in The New York Times, January 15, 2006
This article on diseases that kill people versus diseases that worry people concluded a New York Times series on diabetes. It’s a pretty decent quick summary of the hazard-versus-outrage basics, as applied to illness. One of the health psychology experts quoted seems to think a flu pandemic isn’t worth worrying about — but other than that it’s a good overview.
The link above is to the article on this site. The original is available online at The New York Times website (requires registration).
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Broadcast on “Morning Edition,” NPR (National Public Radio), January 10, 2006
This is the second “Morning Edition” story by NPR’s Jon Hamilton that draws on his two-hour December 2005 interview with me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. This one uses other sources as well, and focuses on what governments should do to avoid fostering panic in (or before) a pandemic. Hamilton makes good use of our concept of “panic panic” — official fear that the public may be panicking when there is no evidence that it is doing so.
The link takes you to an offsite written summary of Hamilton’s story, and to NPR’s link to the audio file.
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Broadcast on “Morning Edition,” NPR (National Public Radio), December 28, 2005
NPR’s Jon Hamilton came to New Jersey with a dozen audio clips of top U.S. officials talking about bird flu, and spent two hours going over the clips with me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard. He put a little of what he got into an eight-minute story on what they’re doing right and what’s not so right in bird flu and pandemic risk communication. Jody and I think Hamilton did an excellent job of getting to some of the big issues: the need to find a balance between excessive fear and insufficient fear, the importance of getting the public involved rather than pretending the government will do it all, etc.
The link takes you to an offsite written summary of Hamilton’s story, and to NPR’s link to the audio file.
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Published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, vol. 78, December 2005, pp. 369–376
This article was adapted from a presentation my wife and colleague Jody Lanard gave at an October 21, 2005 symposium on “Ethical Aspects of Avian Influenza Pandemic Preparedness” at Yale University. It focuses chiefly on official opposition to Tamiflu stockpiling, official enthusiasm for vaccines and antivirals, and official reluctance to involve the public in pandemic planning.
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Are you a sitting duck for bird flu?
Published in USA Today [posted online at USATODAY.com December 6, 2005]
This story on the flu pandemic precautions people are taking is more respectful than journalists usually are of the people on one end of the bell curve — those who are preparing strenuously for the worst case scenario, stockpiling medications, food, and even weapons. The story quotes me on the wisdom of taking at least some precautions, of not being on the opposite end of the bell curve – and then getting on with life. It also quotes me on the value of thinking through what a serious pandemic might be like, so as to be psychologically prepared as well.
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Published in U.S. News and World Report, November 21, 2005; online November 13, 2005
This is an excellent summary of the dilemma authorities face when trying to alert the public to the risk of pandemic flu — a risk that could be severe or mild, imminent or far into the future. Despite its title, the article does point out that the risk of inciting panic isn’t a major problem, although the (unjustified) fear of inciting panic is. It offers justified praise to the U.S. government and the World Health Organization for their increasing willingness to sound the alarm.
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Getting Workers to Wear PPE: Communication Is Key
Published in Safety Compliance Letter, September 2005, pp. 7, 10
Employees may resist wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) for all sorts of reasons: It’s uncomfortable; it interferes with productivity; it’s not the macho thing to do; management doesn’t really mean it; the safety person’s warnings sound a lot like my mother. This article discusses some of my ideas about how to be convincing in the face of these reasons.
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Published in The Christian Science Monitor, July 7, 2005
This short news story deals with the controversy over how much to try to alarm the public about a possible flu pandemic. Predictably, I anchor the go-ahead-and-scare-them side of the debate.
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Most Canadians have taken note of the threat of a flu pandemic
Distributed by Canadian Press, March 30, 2005
Helen Branswell initially wrote to me for my comments on a survey of Canadian awareness of avian influenza, which showed higher awareness than I’d expected but also more skepticism. My complete response is on this site.
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Published in ISHN Ezine (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), January 21, 2006
This assessment of whether safety professionals should use fear appeals quotes me in favor.
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Psychological Barriers Getting in the Way of Pandemic Preparations: Experts
Distributed by Canadian Press, November 20, 2004
Helen Branswell initially wrote to me for my comments on the psychology of flu pandemic preparedness.
My complete response (“Preparing People for a Flu Pandemic”) is on this site.
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Keeping the Barricades Away from Your Refinery Gate
Published in Hydrocarbon Processing, October 2004, p. 15
Tim Lloyd Wright initially wrote to me for my comments on the oil price hike as a source of outrage.
My complete response (“Coping with Outrage about Oil Price Hikes”) is on this site.
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Risk Management: Not Cleaning Up Your Act Can Be Costly
Published in Treasury & Risk Management, September, 2004
This overview of reputation management focuses on corporate reputation as an economic asset – and how to protect the asset.
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Public Communications Regarding the Detection of Lead in Washington, D.C. WaterTestimony before the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Water, U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, Oversight Hearing on the Detection of Lead in D.C. Drinking Water, April 7, 2004
When a U.S. Senate committee decided to look at a lead-in-drinking-water controversy in Washington, D.C., it invited my wife and colleague Jody Lanard to speak. Her written testimony reviews some of our principles of crisis communication and outrage management, and applies them to the way Washington’s water utility was handling the finding of too much lead. The hearing itself can be viewed as streaming video on the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee web site at http://epw.senate.gov/epwmultimedia/epw040704.ram. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comments about Jody’s testimony (and about risk communication) start just after 2:02:00. Jody’s oral testimony starts at 2:35:24. Her Q&A starts at 2:50:20, and includes several of her favorite teaching examples.
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Risk Communicator Says USDA Should Prepare Public for More BSE
Published in Food Chemical News, March 29, 2004
This short trade journal piece reviews some of my suggestions and criticisms about USDA mad cow risk communication.
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Scary Food News Has Us Exaggerating Actual Risks
Published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 16, 2004
This is a short overview of some of the usual risk perception and risk communication stuff, quoting some of the usual sources (including me).
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Crisis Communications to the Public: A Missing Link
Chapter 5C.6 of Learning from SARS — Renewal of Public Health in Canada: A Report of the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health (the “Naylor Report”), October 2003
One small section of the official Canadian government report on the lessons of SARS addresses public communication – and leans predominantly on the “scathing” assessment of Sandman and Lanard.
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Fear Factory: Have the Media Overblown Canada’s Health Scares?
Published in Maclean’s, June 9, 2003
When a magazine article starts by asking whether the media have overblown a story – in this case, SARS – you can bet the answer is going to be yes. But the article does quote me (and some others) saying that SARS was serious and that if anything the media were over-reassuring – which paradoxically scared people all the more.
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Published in The Toronto Star, May 30, 2003
This is an almost shockingly lighthearted piece on Toronto’s SARS epidemic. It starts out with a weird focus on the question of whether SARS is God’s punishment, but winds up making some fairly solid points.
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SARS: How Singapore outmanaged the others
Published in Asia Times (Hong Kong), April 9, 2003
I thought Singapore handled SARS risk communication a lot better than China, Hong Kong, or Canada. But I never expected to be explaining why in a Hong Kong newspaper.
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Published in ISHN (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), March 28, 2003
Jody Lanard and I wrote “Duct Tape Risk Communication” to analyze the weird public response to the U.S. Government advice to stockpile duct tape for use against some kinds of terrorist attacks. Dave Johnson saw an analogy to the weird way employees sometimes respond to safety messaging, and went with it.
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Candour, not PR, will calm virus fears
Published in The Straits Times, Singapore, March 27, 2003
Early in Singapore’s SARS epidemic, the country’s dominant English-language newspaper published this article on how two American risk communicators thought it should manage the crisis.
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Weighing Your Risks of Becoming a Terror Victim
Published in The New York Times Week in Review, March 23, 2003
I’m quoted here on just one point, but it’s an important one: the need to get people accustomed to their fear of terrorism, to show them how to cope with that fear rather than trying to relieve them of it. (There, now you don’t have to read the article.)
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Managing Best Practices: Been there, done that?
Published in ISHN (Industrial Safety & Hygiene News), November 27, 2002
This short column endorses my advice to investigate “yellow flags” instead of ignoring them, and links that advice to the work of Abraham Maslow and Stephen Covey (good company).
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Environmental & Safety Issues: Managing Risk
Published in Industrial Heating, November 2002
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Based on a speech I gave, this short article summarizes my “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula and my six key strategies for managing outrage.
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Published in The BSCS Newsletter [Biological Sciences Curriculum Study], Fall 2002
How should teachers talk to kids about terrorism? This short article has my views and the views of others.
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Published in the Denver Post, Sunday, August 4, 2002
I am one of the experts quoted in this brief article on a 2002 meat recall.
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Published in The Trenton Times, July 12, 2002
I think this is my wife and colleague Jody Lanard’s first risk communication publication, a newspaper op-ed urging that people who want to be vaccinated against smallpox get sent to “vaccination camp.”
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Published in Zurich Risk Engineering’s magazine the linkbetween, Issue 33, Jan 2001
Because of the insurance industry focus, this summary of my “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula picks up on some aspects that are usually ignored, such as the very different reasons why employees and employers can get outraged at efforts to improve corporate safety.
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From the Director (presentation summary)
Published in ABSP Linkages, the Newsletter of the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project based at Michigan State University, Third Quarter 2000
Ag biotech leader Catherine Ives heard me speak at a biotechnology conference. Her short column summarizes my presentation and draws some conclusions for reducing people’s outrage at biotechnology.
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Risk Communication and Education of OHS Professionals
Published in Occupational Hazards, September 1, 2000
In this short column Steve Levine argues that risk communication should be part of the industrial hygiene curriculum.
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Chapter 11, “Media Campaigns” in Environmental Education & Communication for a Sustainable World
Published by the Academy for Educational Development, 2000
Brian Day was my graduate student before going on to do communications for Environmental Defense Fund, GreenCOM, and other environmental advocacy efforts. In this chapter from a book he co-edited with Martha Monroe, Brian outlines a persuasion theory I taught him back in the 1970s – an approach to precaution advocacy that uses both an information-based component and a need-based component.
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Published in Reputation Management, May 2000
I am one of several experts quoted in this analysis of what the food biotech industry has done wrong in its management of public outrage.
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Restocking the Shelves: Recovering from a Recall
Published in Food Quality, June/July, 1999
This is a pretty good overview of various expert opinions (including mine) on how food companies should behave after a recall.
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Running risk of public outrage
Published in The London Times Business Section, June 1, 1999
Though its news peg is my then-new “Outrage” software, this article is more an outrage management overview. I’ll love it forever for calling me “the Red Adair of the world of corporate reputations.”
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Don’t Be Gun-Shy: PR Experts Advise the Gun Industry
Published at ABCNEWS.com from TheStreet.com, May 27, 1999
In this short article on how the gun industry should cope with school shootings, I am predictably on the side of responsiveness.
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We can work it out with Outrage
Published in New Scientist, May 1, 1999
This extremely short squib on my “Outrage” software assumes that outrage management and spin doctoring are the same thing.
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Risky Business: Spin doctors may be obsolete
Published in The Guardian, Saturday May 1, 1999
This amusing take on my “Outrage” software begins with how Pharaoh should have handled his Moses problem.
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Published in New Scientist, March 27, 1999
Instead of criticizing the public for getting outraged about biotech, this short piece criticizes the industry for ignoring and mishandling the public’s outrage.
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Published in CAREline® Global Responsible Care® News, Volume 16, 1999
Nothing new here – but it’s convenient if you want my six principal outrage management strategies, my four stages of a risk controversy, and my twelve principal outrage components all in one spot.
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PR Watch Volume 6, #1, First Quarter 1999
This is an entire issue of the quarterly PR Watch, devoted to a variety of articles critiquing me and my approach to risk communication, nearly all of them by Bob Burton. PR Watch watchdogs the public relations industry from a generally left perspective; Bob Burton writes mostly about the mining industry from that perspective. Obviously, I don’t share the author’s and publisher’s view that helping corporate polluters listen better is a dangerous new sort of “greenwashing” manipulation. But the quotes are all accurate and the description of my positions is mostly on-target. (Corporate dinosaurs also tend to see my approach as dangerous; maybe the polarizers always detest the compromisers.) Anyway, who wouldn’t be flattered to be the subject of a whole magazine issue?
The articles:
- Flack Attack
- Advice on Making Nice: Peter Sandman Plots to Make You a Winner
- Some Clients of Peter Sandman
- Chilling and Gassing with the Environmental Defense Fund
- Community Advisory Panels: Corporate Cat Herding
- Mad as Hell? This Program May Have Your Number
- Packaging the Beast: A Public Relations Lesson in Type Casting
Letters responding to the PR Watch issue:
- Letter in volume 6, no. 2 (second quarter 1999)
- Letter in volume 6, no. 3 (third quarter 1999)
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Published in The Times (U.K.), February 19, 1999
This op-ed complains about inaccurate media coverage of mad cow disease. It cites me to make the point that reporters cover both sides of controversies without worrying about which side is right.
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The Dangers of Ignoring Public Ire
Published in Business Review Weekly, August 31, 1998
This quick overview of my “Outrage” software was written for a business audience.
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Copepodology for the ornithologist, or what BSE can tell us about RCD
Paper presented to CSIRO Workshop on RCD and Rabbits, Canberra, 29 April 1997
I don’t know anything about Rabbit Calcivirus Disease (RCD), which the Australian government apparently used in an effort to control its rabbit population. This article argues that the Australian government was making the same mistakes with regard to RCD that the British government had made with regard to BSE (mad cow disease) – and that these mistakes are best understood in terms of my work on the hazard-versus-outrage distinction.
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Published in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 1997
The authors did a qualitative content analysis of Australian media coverage of controversies over mobile telephone towers, searching for my various “outrage factors.” They found plenty of good examples to support their conclusion that the media pay more attention to outrage than to hazard.
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Our ‘Stolen Future’ and the Precautionary Principle
Published in Priorities, American Council on Science and Health, vol 8., no. 3, 1996
This short article by the President of the American Council on Science and Health criticizes the Precautionary Principle and a book on endocrine disruptors that invokes the Precautionary Principle. Then it segues to an off-topic criticism of an article I had coauthored that explained why people were outraged by Alar (a growth regulator that used to be sprayed on apples) even though it wasn’t very hazardous. Whelan takes umbrage at technical precautions against low-hazard, high-outrage risks. That’s not what I advocate; I push clients to try harder not to get people so upset about such risks in the first place. This is a common misunderstanding of my position, made in this case by an eminent policy advocate – which I guess justifies a gloss that’s almost as long as the part of the article where I’m criticized.
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Notes from a class by Dr. Peter Sandman
Posted originally on Elenor Snow’s personal website, 1995
In 1993–1995, I had a contract with Westinghouse to do training and consulting in association with the company’s contract to manage the cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (a key weapons manufacturing site during the cold war). Elenor Snow was then a technical editor at Hanford. She attended one of my seminars in September 1994, and later posted her notes on her personal website. Over the years, I got periodic referrals from Elenor’s website – and she became a website designer. So in 1999 when I decided to launch a website of my own, it was natural to ask for Elenor’s help. Almost a decade later, she is still my webmaster – and her “Notes from a class” is still a good summary of what I was telling people back in the 1990s about where outrage comes from and how to reduce it, particularly at a nuclear cleanup.
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2018
2017
2016
Zika Virus In The US: How The Outbreak Became A Public Relations Mess
Posted on the International Business Times website, June 9, 2016
Transcript of our side of Elizabeth Whitman’s telephone interview with Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard, May 27, 2016
On May 27, 2016, Elizabeth Whitman of International Business Times emailed me to request a telephone interview with both me and my wife and colleague Jody Lanard about “how public health officials juggle the need to educate the public and convey a sense of urgency about the Zika virus without sending people into unnecessary panic.” We did the interview the same day.
But instead of focusing on education/urgency versus panic, we focused on our judgment that public health messaging about Zika risk in the continental U.S. had become much more alarmist starting around the beginning of April. That was when White House officials preempted one of the CDC’s key Zika messages: that domestic Zika outbreaks were very likely (but not guaranteed) to be small and local. Instead of preparing Americans to take limited domestic Zika outbreaks in stride, we told Elizabeth, the White House started preparing Americans to expect epidemic-level domestic Zika outbreaks; to see even small limited domestic Zika outbreaks as widespread and catastrophic; and to blame them on Republicans for failing to pass Zika funding.
Elizabeth’s June 9 story made only a little use of our interview. She ignored our main point about the hijacked message. Instead, her main point was how hard it is for public health officials to communicate nuance to a frightened population. And she wrongly attributed to us the view that there was a “media frenzy” to cover Zika that made “crucial nuances disappear.” We taped the interview. Since we didn’t have Elizabeth’s permission to record and publish her side of the conversation, a transcript of our side only is posted here, very slightly edited for clarity but not content. We have also added boldface headings, bracketed clarifications, links, and endnotes documenting a few of the many sources that led to our analysis. By the time we got done adding all that, we decided to post the resulting document as a column as well as posting it in “Peter M. Sandman in the News.“
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The transcript of our interview with Elizabeth Whitman is located on this site
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2015
2014
Aired on Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Media Report” radio program and posted on its website, August 28, 2014
Interview with Peter Sandman by Richard Aedy, August 11, 2014
Richard Aedy interviewed me for Australian radio via telephone for 20 minutes on August 11. The edited 11:40 interview aired on August 28, a few days before I started a speaking and consulting tour of Australia. There’s nothing special about this interview, except the fact that it’s recent and short. We covered the usual basics: the hazard-versus-outrage distinction, the three paradigms of risk communication, etc. Like many media interviewers, Richard was especially interested in whether risk communication is really just a different label for “spin,” and in what I think about the performance of the media. (In fairness, he asked about social media as well as mainstream media.) As always, I prefer the longer or more idiosyncratic interviews. But this one is a sensible quick orientation.
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