[Music]
hello bonjour and ahoy
on tuesday evening we hosted the
globesec awards ceremony at the
bratislava castle
where we awarded the annual czech and
slovak transatlantic award to both
general john allen
and vatsville havel in memoriam and here
are the highlights
from day two we kicked off the day on
the main stage hearing from the foreign
affairs minister of slovakia
and austria as well as the deputy
foreign affairs minister of italy on how
to strengthen europe's rule on the
international stage
staying on the subject of european
diplomacy we heard from the foreign
affairs minister of croatia
north macedonia and slovenia on their
respective trajectories towards
achieving an ever greater european
integration
this was followed by a lively discussion
among foreign affairs ministers of the
visigrad 4
which included poland hungary czech
republic and slovakia
mayors from bratislava and budapest as
well as a voice from the czech republic
discussed the reactions of cities to the
pandemic and the need to improve
communications with government and
generate more capacity in times of
crisis
with the meaning between biden and putin
taking place experts from russia
the eu and north america speculated on
the potential outcomes and what to look
for finally
we ended the day by hearing from
renowned thinker francis fukiyama
about the need to rebuild the
foundations of democracy and trust
throughout societies
our list of international expert and
renowned thinkers is
far from over so stay tuned for more
video highlights and recaps
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
ladies and gentlemen please welcome the
moderator of the last day at globe sec
2021
julia bellus
[Music]
hello everyone so welcome to this
session
um and a very warm welcome to the
panelists who are
coming in from all over i guess europe
and the uk
um my name is julia blues i'm a senior
health correspondent at vox
and it's my pleasure to be here today i
think we're talking about one of the
most
important issues of the pandemic
how to build trust in vaccines in an
environment where it's
kind of exceptionally difficult to know
who or what to trust
not only do we have this kind of
onslaught of information and
scientific knowledge coming at us at all
times but we also
have to deal with bad actors who are
spreading misinformation and
disinformation
and so the focus today is on how to
fight information in security and we
have
a distinguished panel to help us so i'll
start with the
person who's joining us from beautiful
bratislava
miroslava serviris is the senior
research fellow in the democracy and
resilience program
in the globsec policy institute here in
bratislava
we also have henry collis who's joining
us from london
he is the deputy director of national
security communications in the uk
cabinet office
where he co-leads cross-government
planning and delivery of communication
activity
to achieve the uk's national security
objectives
we also have melinda frost who's joining
us from geneva
um in the world health organization
she's the leader of the translate
science team
and working on the inf infodemic
management kovit 19 response at who
and so today um like the um
infodemic we have questions coming at us
from all angles
so people will be submitting questions
via zoom
via the globsec app and of course for
everyone in the room you can stand up
or raise your hand when you have a
question and go to the microphone there
when you're called on and so i think the
the best way to start the panel today is
to kind of give it
give a sense to the audience of the
problem the scale of the problem
um and i thought from your various
vantage points we could talk about
how the misinformation or disinformation
campaigns you're tracking are affecting
the vaccine rollout
and maybe we could start with miroslava
thank you very much julia
also for this kind introduction so when
we speak about the
info they're making and uh this
information affecting vaccine rollout i
think
the obvious uh answer would be that yes
obviously this information does affect a
rollout of the vaccination
but then we also can't make sweeping
generalizations i think it's much better
in some countries you know some
countries where obviously conspiracy
theories about
covet 19 are not so prominent such as
for example in austria
they're according to our globsec trends
2021 data we see
that actually the disinformation
campaigns do not have such an effect
because
um the vaccination rollout there is more
successful
than in other ce countries um such as
for example
romania or bulgaria where you have quite
um
large prominence of some covet 19
related conspiracy theories so we do see
this this link between between
conspiracy
theories uh about covid19 or
disinformation
and and vaccination rollout but also
i would like to um just stress or point
out
that when we speak about this and
conspiracy theories we often
imagine you know the trolls in in saint
petersburg
spreading this information which is
absolutely true this has been a part of
of roll out of some vaccines where
really target of
strong disinformation campaigns or
information operations seeking to
discredit some of these vaccines
particularly the astrazeneca vaccine
but in the information chaos that is the
epidemic we have also seen that public
figures have
sometimes um you know wittingly or
unwittingly
provided incorrect information to the
public
and we can mention you know the former
president donald trump and
and and his advice to general
populations on how to treat kovite 19
which was actually incorrect
um or even sometimes i think mainstream
media
um have some in some cases struggled a
bit
with reporting on on the vaccination for
example in slovakia we had a case where
basically on a prime time tv at 8 00 p.m
when you know
um the the whole let's say nation
watches tv in the evening we had this
one case of a woman dying
uh shortly after receiving jeb um
from astrazeneca vaccine and um
this report basically made a direct made
a direct
link between this jab and between um
the resulting death of of this lady
later on it was discovered that the
death was not related to the vaccine
and that also you know the reporter who
was who was basically
responsible for producing the story was
her relative so there was obviously some
kind of a bias involved as well
but you know the damage has been done
and then when you have these kind of
stories promulgated in the information
space
it's very difficult for um for anybody
to really navigate
what is true and what isn't true anymore
so
right you know i'd love to bring in
melinda
in geneva who has kind of this global
overview
because you're seeing yeah that it's not
just um
it's not even just yeah online or public
figures there's also this
world of offline and impenetrable
networks of disinformation being spread
yeah all right thank you thank you julia
and i completely agree with the the
um things that miroslava had mentioned
as well that it's a pretty complicated
issue particularly when
it comes to vaccines we've always known
that
communicating vaccines even during
non-emergencies and rolling out new
vaccines can introduce a lot of
concerns and questions and valid
questions on the part of a population
but now during covert 19 when you pull
in the mix
of changing science um
eminent threat to some individual's
concern
and things are just changing so there's
a lot of uncertainty
people have questions and concerns so
this is sort of a right
field for miss and disinformation and
i'm really excited to see that we have a
session
on uh focused on infodemex this is
something that the world health
organization
has really uh pushed the envelope on we
started an infodemics management
pillar as part of the covid19 response
at the very beginning within the first
month of the response in 2020
so this has been an area of focus for us
so we've been trying to track
misinformation and disinformation and
really learn more about how to respond
to that
in order to address people's concerns
what we see
a lot when it comes to disinformation is
or
during any emergency it's essentially
that people will sort of revert back
to the information sources that they
trust those may be individuals they may
be
mass media traditional media they may be
social media
and then i think what we found too
during coven 19 and particularly as
countries begin to do lockdowns too
people were turning a little bit more
towards social media
and as people were uncertain and
uh more stressed because of the
situation of kokod 19
they sought more information to relieve
that stress and yet what we
think and what studies are being
beginning to show is that actually
caused
more stress because there were more
confusions particularly when they were
trying to seek information
with online sources so which is doing
quite a bit of work around this to
to figure out more about how to track
misinformation disinformation
uh learn more about how we um combat
that and how we can respond to that
to decrease that that conversation
online
and how to pre-bunk how to get
information good information
out before disinformation in this
information has a chance to really grow
within the information ecosphere so a
lot a lot of work going on around this
and
and i'm glad we're talking about
vaccines today this is a
you know the most important issue right
now but just to say too we've been
tracking miss and disinformation just in
the copa 19 response too in terms of
uh cures or prevention methods uh so
this has been something we've been doing
again for about 18 months and
we're learning quite a bit and i can
talk maybe a little bit later in the
program about what the future holds
for who and empowered thank you melinda
and harry can you give us the view from
london
yes of course um i think it's um
important to sort of draw out a couple
of the things that uh my esteemed
fellow panelists mentioned and in
particular it's this this underlying
issue of of
trust and i think it's important to
acknowledge
um that disinformation doesn't create
create divisions or create
these kind of beliefs but what it does
is land an environment where it
exacerbates them and it really
different actors with different
motivations really
try to exploit that for for their own
purposes
and when we're looking at the issue here
i think
you know it does come down to trust but
we need to disaggregate
exactly what that trust is in
trust in this context is not just about
trust in the product i.e the vaccine
but it's also very much about trust in
the institutions that are developing
supplying and administering
the vaccine and belief that those
institutions have
um public interest and interest of
different groups
at heart and of course this is all
happening in a context that i know
uh globsex discussed at length in
previous years which is a general trend
of declining trust
uh in in government institutions uh
worldwide and
that's sort of widely highlighted in a
number of surveys but notably of course
the edelman trust barometer
and so we need to make sure that we are
working
in a way that um understands exactly how
we can overcome those barriers with
different groups
and i think about the challenge here as
being one of
uh supply and demand uh for
accurate information and when it comes
to how we use strategic communications
part of what we need to do is to
actually create demand
for accurate information and there are a
number of campaigns and activities that
the uk has has developed and worked on
with our partners to
help uh nudge um
populations to seek out accurate
information but also to be able to
detect
inaccurate uh information um and then of
course on the supply side
um it's a case of ensuring that accurate
information is brought to those
audiences
in a way that they find trustful
domestically in the uk
uh we've uh we're lucky enough to enjoy
high levels of vaccine confidence
overall with over 70 percent
of the uk population um saying they
would
accept the vaccine and of course when
you look at how the
uh the the vaccine hesitant population
actually breaks out according to
different demographic categories you'll
find that that's
significantly higher in certain um in
certain groups
there's a case of finding the trusted
messengers and that we can that we can
bring them accurate information
uh with um so the view from the uk
domestically i think is that you know we
we um
are lucky enough to enjoy relatively
overall high levels of vaccine
confidence and we're working to
find the best way to uh encourage
confidence among those uh
other groups whilst also recognizing
that we can work with our partners
around the world to
use strategic communications to boost
vaccine confidence in
a number of different ways um including
through working with the world health
organization
and henry you mentioned trusted
messengers and i'm curious
where where you've seen the most success
um
like i remember there was a great
campaign was it elton john
you had advocating for for getting the
job and
you you've kind of drawn on yeah to
everything from celebrities
to to obviously yeah other public
leaders so i'm curious
um where you've what you've seen are
particularly successful campaigns from
messengers yeah yeah yeah sure
no celebrities are great and
particularly when you're thinking about
you know appealing to
um to finding individuals that resonate
with specific audiences and they have
quite
broad appeal um and when we think about
youth audiences of course it's a great
way to engage them because
you know they're not going to be
necessarily listening to mainstream news
and they don't want to hear from
politicians and so you can find people
that you know sports stars musicians
that they really
uh that they already follow on social
media and they're going to
they're going to pick up that content
just through their routine
sort of um information consumption
activity
but i think the most important ones
aren't the aren't the high profile ones
and it's actually bringing the messaging
down
um to the uh to as local level
as possible and finding individuals that
are influential
influential with specific communities
like uh religious leaders
uh health professionals um so just
anecdotally as i um
walk out of my stairwell in my building
in the morning and i live in a central
area of london
very diverse communities and so there's
an image of
an imam uh who works in the local
community uh talking uh about his
confidence in the vaccine uh on a poster
in the stairwell and it's you know
bringing these very local voices that
are recognized in small communities
um to the fore uh that is essential to
build trust
i imagine that's a challenge for an
organization like the who that's working
globally like
when just covering this issue over a
decade you see how
even making generalizations about
vaccine hesitancy in a country are
difficult because
it's so these these um yeah pockets of
refusal tend to be
pockets like extremely local and um with
it with very specific
um community-based concerns
no yeah that's true i mean i think uh
from the world health organization at
the the global level
every time we communicate anything we
have to think who are we communicating
to
now is it the 15 year old in kenya is it
the
you know 75 year old grandmother in
costa rica
um we have a huge audience and so it
does um
and i think miroslava mentioned this
earlier too just
vaccine hesitancy in particular is a
very very nuanced
issue it's it's the somebody's
questioning the vaccine could be very
valid
um i think a lot of what we're seeing
actually in in europe right now
isn't so much people questioning the
vaccine although there is some of that
uh it's people's ease of access to get
to the back
get vaccine it's not as easy in some
locations to get it as it is others
um but just to touch on what henry was
mentioning in terms of trusted
sources of information this is something
that the who has been working on and
even prior to coping 19
we started a network called the who
information network for epidemics
and the sole purpose of this network we
call it epi win
was to be able to reach out through
trusted sources of information
and we really are targeting three
partner networks one is youth to reach
out to this very unique population
it's critically important now uh during
vaccine because
with the vaccine rollout of coba 19
we're we're targeting
populations that aren't usually targeted
for vaccines so it's a unique situation
in that respect
we also are working through faith
organizations as well
and working side by side with them we've
done some very exciting initiatives
where we've
co-written guidance together with faith
organizations to better target
their trusted constituents um through
these methods and we work
of course all over the world so very
very different circumstances and
different countries and and and
communities as well
and we're also working through the
business sector because we've known from
the past as henry indicated
through and adam and the barometer trust
that that
oftentimes people really trust
information that are coming from their
employer networks as well so we've tried
to work through those
mechanisms as well um in terms of choice
of vaccine
we're seeing that globally and also in
europe too
a female population is often
a little bit more hesitant than male
population so we're trying to
kind of work around that issue as well
and um yeah i think at this point it's
we're beyond the global messaging on
this everything has to become much much
more nuanced
and we're really targeting efforts
around community engagement and
empowerment community-led initiatives
to reach out to individuals to have
those individual conversations so that
people can
truly get their very valid questions
answered through trusted
trusted networks and that can often be
the healthcare providers as well
wonderful and i want to turn to
solutions in a moment but
first um we have some research from
miroslava
in a poll um so what proportion can
can can we bring up the poll actually so
everyone can see it
there we go so what proportion of the
adult population across central and
eastern europe
believe that covid is a planned
operation or conspiracy
by the hidden forces and elites to
control the population
if everyone could submit an answer 8
18 28 38
uh how long do we usually give for these
polls
of our precious time think it's out
there oh there we go okay
okay interesting
so i can say that people are a bit more
optimistic
than they should be okay so it's not 18
percent across cee is actually 28
across cee so it's fairly fairly
large proportion of the population and
um
the reason why we looked at this uh
so-called plandemic conspiracy theory is
because
um we wanted to by you know observing
what's going on on social media because
you know plundering and
this kind of um let's say
what should be fringe conspiracy
theories are
not generally seen on mainstream media
and most of the ce
countries um so this is something that's
definitely being
perpetuated online and we just wanted to
kind of test the impact of the you know
digital environment on on the way we
form our opinions about
about the pandemic and obviously again
this is a
average number for a whole cee so it's
worse in some countries and
and better in some countries but it just
goes to show you the power that these
types of
um conspiracy theories have and it's
quite also interesting that
you see this perpetuation of
disinformation narratives about covet 19
globally so
whereas before you know the digital
revolution
conspiracy theories were always kind of
part of our lives let's not pretend that
it was ever any different
but what we see right now is this
perpetuation of conspiracy theories
which are
truly global so um something that alex
jones from infowars was
adamantly you know promoting in the u.s
was professionally voiced over into
slovak
a very professional actor um yes very
nicely sounding voice-over
and it was a video shared on facebook
which was shared 16 000 times which by
slovak standards is like
extremely large number and obviously um
facebook
did in cooperation with independent fact
checkers
fact checked this video and it always
came with this little disclaimer you
know that the information in this video
is factually incorrect but that didn't
really
stop the promotion of the video and so
then you see
all these um basically perpetuation of
conspiracy theories from all kinds of
you know
corners of the world and they influence
very specific local communities which
previously they
wouldn't actually be able wouldn't
actually be able to reach so
i just wanted to also by showing this
poll um demonstrate um the power
of this information and the power of
conspiracy theories and
obviously the issues that this poses to
vaccination efforts and
to just overcoming the pandemic and we
have a question from the audience
that's that's related um so so
someone oh we have another question from
the audience okay we'll do the first
question
so what are some of the dividing lines
between those who are more
and less prone to believing or to being
disinformed and misinformed
um we've talked about yeah a lot of the
things that we're drawing in are these
longer term
challenges like trust in government
maybe educational gaps
and i'm wondering if yeah what we're
learning now in the pandemic
um yeah where where these dividing lines
might fall
that's a very good question and again
it's not as easy as it seems like
intuitively we would say that you know
it's always people with lower education
who believe in
conspiracy theories more or um
that it's people in rural areas but this
isn't always the case so
when we look at different countries the
picture is quite different or sometimes
it's the younger generation who is more
prone than the older generation which
also seems kind of counterintuitive
so how we were talking melinda and henry
both
quite correctly pointing out that
strategy communication requires
tailoring that you need to tailor
specific message to
the audience that you're targeting
because that will resonate
and in similar way this information
works too so it's sort of like
you know the dark side of the
information spectrum
so certain um types of disinformation or
certain types of conspiracy theories
resonate among different sections of the
population more
and we know many examples of this and
often as henry pointed out they
feed into pre-existing fears or even
legitimate grievances
so for example um you know
the conspiracy theory that has been
spread in the past about
about the hiv virus uh that you know um
there was a conspiracy theory that
basically
uh it has been invented you know um this
has been spread by uh
by pro-russian actors that that this um
hiv virus was produced by the us
you know and so in some parts of of
africa these types of conspiracy
theories
can result can resonate for for
different reasons you know or for
example
conspiracy or disinformation about
migration
resonates strongly in hungary because of
you know the current regime because of
the migration crisis that has been blown
out of proportion
but when you look at this information
about kovid 19 in hungary
actually you will find that hungary is
one one of the more
resistant countries towards this type of
misinformation and you will see that
other countries such as in the western
balkans or even in slovakia
is much more receptive to to these types
of
conspiracy theories and yes it has got
to do a lot with
with trust in institutions or mistrust
in in government or or in mainstream
media
so it depends and one dividing line that
melinda brought up is the
the gender dividing line which i didn't
realize was a
it sounds like it's a global issue that
that women
are more hesitant than men and do we
understand
yeah what do we understand about that
i don't think we quite understand
everything about that and it's just a
slight trend that we're seeing that i
think is
sort of surprising a lot of us um
potentially maybe henry knows more about
the situation in the uk
um but i do want to kind of bridge off
of what miroslava was saying in terms of
this divide and i think a lot of our gut
reactions before this would have been
um again trust in government trust in
leaders that's what we've sort of always
known during an emergency
you can't build trust in the middle of
an emergency it has to be the foundation
from which you start prior to an
emergency
um so if there was a foundation of maybe
not even lack of trust in the government
but just maybe a bad experience with the
public health system
that's going to affect people's
perception um
on whether or not you know responders
have their best interests in mind
have the capability to manage this can
get their
questions answered answered and and
really understand the lives in which
people
are leading and this is um common to
focus more now than ever
i mean we've seen you know countries
that have never necessarily
had to rely on community mechanisms for
engagement strategies really have to do
this now and then those
those uh those mechanisms may not have
been in place in some western european
countries
or in higher income countries and yet
they really needed them during
during um during this response
uh also i think one of the trends we're
starting to pick up is that
individuals that rely on information
through more maybe more traditional
media
um maybe televised or written
media tend to not be so
susceptible to disinformation because
there's an opportunity
to have more of a discourse in those
types of media so they can hear the pros
the cons the arguments for and against
whereas potentially with social media
there's just little sort of snippets of
information and not as much of a chance
to sort of really
um dissect an issue so we're
tending it we're beginning to see that
kind of trend as well so where people
seek their information could really have
a factor on whether or not they're
susceptible
to to disinformation
great and i have a question from the
audience
um through the app and by the way if
anyone in the room has questions please
feel free to to go to the
mic in the corner here so so one that i
wanted to direct at
henry how do you see the responsibility
of vaccine producers
and the medical establishment more
widely for communicating to the public
when governments are mistrusted
yeah that's an excellent question um and
of course
um vaccine producers tend to be global
pharmaceutical companies they have quite
large
marketing budgets i think you know um
it's in their interest to
uh to actually use that to promote the
vaccine um
to um to uh patients and customers
um and and within that to identify
um exactly um what kind of barriers
there might be to
uh to promoting the vaccine uh to them
i think in doing that process though i
think um and this is something not just
for the vaccine
produces but for us more generally when
we think about public health
as a national priority at the moment is
is the need to prioritize these
different audiences
and the last question about dividing
lines i thought was you know a very good
one because it really got to the heart
of what
are the different motivations that
people have with different reasons
that people have for being hesitant and
melinda sort of
picked out a really good range of them
and you know
at one end you have people yes that
believe in conspiracy theories
um and you know that correlates with um
in in our research looking at the uk
when we've tried to understand
where disinformation lands and why it
gets traction we see that sort of the
propensity to believe conspiracy
theories actually
correlates with the political extremes
and they're actually very hard audiences
to win over
um but but there's a spectrum and a
range it's not that there is a line over
which certainly someone doesn't want the
vaccine you know there are a range of
different
um different reasons that people are
hesitant and and
and you know uh in terms of reaching our
goal
in this instance which is vaccinating as
many of the population as
possible in support of our pathway out
of the pandemic
we need to prioritize those audiences
and understand exactly how we can win
over
most of them and recognize that some of
them will be unreconcilable
um and you know i think generally when
we've thought about disinformation in
other contexts
when we for example in the wake of the
salisbury attack when the uk was dealing
with a disinformation
attack from the russian state we
recognized that there were some
audiences in the uk for whom the russian
state's narrative about the events
um would always resonate and because
they had
because they inherently believe in these
kind of conspiracy uh
theories and uh what the important thing
was that those
uh narratives didn't break into the
mainstream and didn't start to influence
and they stay in these
echo chambers at each end of the
political spectrum
and so recognizing which audiences we
can actually
inform and bring accurate information to
i think is
is key and of course yes the vaccine
producers play
play a role in that that's a great point
and it's also such a dynamic environment
um in the uk you're changing the
guidance in which
and i guess in every country which
vaccines are coming online
which are being used i know in the us
the vaccine vaccine hesitancy has
actually gotten better over time as more
people are
being vaccinated and you know you talk
to your friends and family and hear that
maybe they didn't have a terrible
experience and terrible side effects and
that increases your willingness to um to
get the job
so yeah it's a it's a highly dynamic and
interesting and challenging environment
so we have a question here from the
audience please
um introduce yourself and state the
question as a question
hi uh yes uh good morning i'm anja
nussbaum i'm a journalist for bloomberg
news
and i have a question about the need to
reconcile
the legitimate um queries about the
origin
the legitimate need to to to query about
the origin of the virus
and the need to fight conspiracy
theories and what i mean is that
last year a lot of us were very quick to
dismiss um
the thesis about the origin of the virus
coming from johann
accidental non-accidental doesn't matter
but a lot of us were very quick to
dismiss that because it was a theory
that was
spread by donald trump basically and and
a certain part of the political spectrum
uh this year the this is being discussed
again you know we're
seeing more and more uh questions from
scientists about the origin of the virus
and whether or not uh these um these
theories are true uh how do you
reconcile the need to investigate
uh and uh they need not to dismiss
certain theories and they need to also
you know make sure that people don't
don't go crazy over
all the crazy theories the question
yes absolutely great question i think
the issue always is when
a legitimate question becomes
politicized because
this is exactly what would happen you
know in the case of donald trump
it was so clear to everyone that there
is an ulterior motive to this and then
it becomes really difficult to take this
notion seriously
but i think the reconciling part um
comes when we and this has been repeated
so often during
during the pandemic that i'm not going
to say anything new
but it's basically trusting the experts
who are actually doing the research and
giving them
voice which is not politicized and
giving them
the floor and the space to speak
authoritatively on some of these things
and also it's about not jumping to
conclusions very quickly because i think
it's okay to tell to your audience
that this is you know one hypothesis
and it's just one hypothesis which needs
to be explored which needs to be checked
and then needs to be proven true or
wrong essentially
but um there's big difference between
when somebody just like
throws around you know these notions
without any kind of evidence
so i think it's about and this sort of
fits into
a broader issue of how we even how the
media
and how politicians and how public
authorities
communicate potentially very complex
issues
to public audiences in an in an
understandable
manner essentially and it's very
difficult so i understand like oh
majority of stakeholders made some
mistakes over the past you know
one and a half year in terms of
communicating the pandemic because the
situation develops so rapidly
that actually having safe knowledge of
of
what is actually going on is being
constantly changed and updated
but again i think that needs to be
communicated to the audiences as well
that
okay this thing is new for all of us and
we are still in the process
of of finding out so if that is
you know um sort of communicated well
then i think the audiences are able to
understand it
but people will always you know try to
use these things for their political and
so
i think from a journalist journalist
perspective um
this this intellectual humility too at
the beginning of the pandemic to say
you know there are there is tremendous
uncertainty about the efficacy
of face mass or about the origin of the
virus and to not be
too quick to be reactionary as well we
only have
four and a half minutes left and i did
want to talk about
solutions so i'm curious from your
various perspectives
we're obviously living through these
policy experiments all over the world
and whether you've seen particularly
effective
methods for combating disinformation and
this longer term and more challenging
project of building trust
and and education as well
um maybe we could start with henry
yeah sure i mean there's a lot of
different bits to that question and i'll
try not to take up all the time um
but i think i mean quickly from our
perspective
strategic communications is is is a key
lever in
uh in promoting vaccine confidence um
and you know i touched earlier on the
reason
on some of the things that make it
effective but in terms of
um in terms of particularly effective
activity that we've seen and
and support there's a um
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an app game called go viral which was
developed
in partnership with university of
cambridge
that uses behavioral insights to
to inoculate
individuals against misinformation by
having them play the part
of someone that is spreading false
information online in
in this simulation um and it's been
proven that just one play of the game
uh reduces uh the perceived uh
reliability of fake news by an average
of 21
and the their their then immunity to uh
false information lasts up to three
months so it's important to note that
all of these behavioral interventions do
have a sort of skill fade to the nudge
that you've
uh you've had with them but yeah we've
translated that into multiple languages
and um
shared it with multiple partners and uh
and
um yeah it's it's proven to have a
behavioral impact on them
i think longer term uh the importance uh
the important thing for for us and i
think uh it's reflected by some of our
allies
is thinking about about three things and
it's it's it's stuff that's reflected in
the uk's
recent integrated review which is a refu
review of security and defense but of
course
features uh health security uh more than
previous reviews have them
uh all of uh all of uh our security
priorities need to be based on
uh on building resilience uh on on
sharing and promoting our values and
then finally of course on international
cooperation with
uh with other nations and and with
multilateral organizations and i think
those are
those are the things that will help us
build trust those are the things that
will help us
uh through the pandemic and those are
the things that will
help us build back better as the world
and melinda um i'll echo
some of what henry said too i think at
least at the world health organization
we are looking at ways to help countries
and communities become more resilient
for the next uh pandemic or next
emergency because there will be one
unfortunately
some of the things we're doing to help
countries really
begin to regain more of that trust
factor
before the next emergencies we've
started a new platform it's a country
based tool called the
early ai supported response with social
listening it enables countries to kind
of pick up potential missing
disinformation
in their own information ecosystem
in their country and it also allows them
to triangulate other epidemiologic data
to kind of really see what's going on in
their own country
we're supporting that we also have a
research agenda for epidemics so we can
learn more about
the impact of the epidemic the spread of
information
and misinformation and really to learn
more about the tools and the mechanisms
that we can employ that may
help uh decrease the amount of
misinformation disinformation
and help to inoculate the population
against that too so these are some of
the things we're looking forward to
in the future and i guess what the other
major
theme here that we keep touching on is
obviously at this this building
trust in in populations and down to the
level of specific communities
so to wrap up could we talk a little bit
right about what government should be
doing now
um to prepare for the next one and this
is yes
there was an audience member who had a
question along these lines in terms
in terms of communications um what
should we be doing now to prepare the
public for the next pandemic
so this is a tough one for some
governments obviously the uk is doing
really well so i think it's always good
to share best practice and and learn
from those who are really succeeding you
know because there are plenty of
countries also in ce who
are struggling with this part and who
are not being trusted
by their constituents because um they
are considered to have you know dealt
with the second wave of the pandemic
really poorly as we have now
um we all know that the cee has been
very much
very badly affected by the second wave
of the pandemic so
rebuilding trust in such an environment
is extremely difficult
but i do believe that we've mentioned it
already efficient strategic
communication is absolutely the key
but also um you know it's about creating
really modern
campaigns information campaigns which
could actually
reach those who who need to who need to
get vaccinated and this has proven to be
a problem in some countries um obviously
the willingness to get vaccinated has
increased so that's the good news
and there are also large bookies of
people who are undecided about
vaccinations so
across eu there's like 20 of the
population so
if governments focus their efforts on on
actually these
undecided um undecided constituents
then perhaps you know um that's one way
of overcoming hopefully
this one pandemic and in the long term
it's all about building
efficient institutions but that's
obviously not something you can
you know change within half a year or a
year that's definitely a long-term
project
and the the other long-term project that
i'm picking up on we need to clone
henry or send him to um yeah
these different places to replicate the
uk experience
um no that that's really helpful
was there anything that henry and
melinda wanted to add
uh well yeah i mean um
we do work internationally with a lot of
our partners to help build strategic
communications capability and i think
you know it's important to recognize
that um that the uk is uh
very keen to make sure that we help as
many of our partners as possible
and just on that great point about you
know what what prepares us for the next
pandemic i think the way we make our way
out of this pandemic
will build trust we should do it in a
way that means that we
um build trust that means that the world
will be more ready for the next one and
of course you know sharing vaccines
is is going to be a key part of that and
that's why we were delighted that one of
the outcomes of the g7
summit uh earlier this week was that the
announcement of a billion vaccines to be
donated
to uh lower-income countries um and you
know it's that kind of display
uh and you know symbolic gesture of our
values that will ensure there is
trust in the international system that
uh that we will come
out of this uh as a globe next time
absolutely yeah well thank you so so
much
everyone for for joining online on the
app
in the audience in geneva and london um
and i think yeah it seems like there are
no
really easy solutions to this problem
and we need to start
certainly thinking about the next one
right now um so thank you for sharing
all your insights and thanks for joining
today
thank you for the discussion
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you