If You're Explaining, You're Losing
The title is a political aphorism that has been attributed to George Will. It means that a message that must be explained is too complicated for the audience. Here are two pandemic-related examples, one old and one new.
The old example is related to mask recommendations. From late February to early March, several public health officials, including CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and Vice President Mike Pence were telling Americans not to wear masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci, saying in a 60 Minutes interview on March 8, 2020:
There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.
About a month later the CDC came to its senses and reversed its guidance and urged people to wear masks. Mask-holes, including the President, seized on the reversal as a way of discrediting the public health officials and used it as an excuse to disregard their advice.
Dr. Fauci had some 'splainin to do. In several interviews in July like this one he defended the earlier positions, saying they didn't know how serious the pandemic was and they were trying to preserve PPE for health care providers. But wait, if they didn't know if the pandemic was serious why did they feel the need to preserve PPE? And why did health care providers need masks if, as the Surgeon General claimed in a tweet, they are not effective in preventing transmission?
This is just bad crisis communication. They could have said "we need to preserve PPE for medical personnel" and left it at that. Instead they said masks aren't effective for the general public, even though they didn't know how effective they were at the time. All this did was undermine their credibility and give openings to detractors to use their words against them, which is exactly what happened.
The new example of explaining and losing is that some medical types have been floating the idea of giving people only one of the injections for vaccines that require two. There are good intentions behind this proposal, namely to get more people vaccinated to at least some level. But it's a bad idea from a crisis communication point of view.
Medical authorities have been telling people for months that these vaccines require two injections to be effective. There has even been hand-wringing about people who might skip their second shot. Now some are saying maybe we can just ignore all that. This is, at best, going to confuse people.
Caroline Chen a reporter covering the pandemic for ProPublica made the same point in a segment on last night's PBS Newshour:
And whatever we do in the US, my biggest concern actually is that we communicate it clearly to the public. So if we've been sending these messages: you have to get your two shots, you have to get your two shots, you have to get your two shots. Wait a second, we only, only need to get one shot. It's going to be confusing. So my hope would be for consistent, clear communication wherever, again, the science leads us.
This reversal too comes at a cost to credibility: So they were wrong before about needing two shots? If they were wrong before how do we know they're not wrong now? We can be sure these questions won't go unasked by anti-vaxxers, who are already viewing this vaccination campaign as their big moment.
This proposal is also getting confused with a plan by the incoming Biden team to distribute vaccines on-hand rather than holding back half for the second dose. They are having to explain that they intend to give everyone the required two shots but are trying to accelerate the first one and betting the manufacturers can produce the second doses in time. That's a big bet and I hope they don't find themselves explaining why it didn't happen.
