Orsolya Bajer-Molnár

Personally, just like anyone else, masks and restrictions and whatnot. For me, it wasn't that difficult to get through. Work-wise, it's a little ambivalent. Because on the one hand, this is what we had been talking about ever since I started working on EIDs, and this is what Dan (Brooks) has been talking about for the past 30 years. And now it's happening. From a professional point of view, the pandemic certainly put the spotlight on our discpline as now everyone finally understands what pathogen evolution can result in, and does result in, whether we acknowledge it or not.

From a scientific perspective, I think there is a very important difference we have to make between prevention and avoidance. We talk about prevention when we prevent an epidemic from breaking out anywhere. Once it has broken out, you can aim to avoid it as much as possible, but you can't work on prevention anymore. Once it's there, it's going to run its course, one way or another. I think prevention did not work, whatsoever, on any level. If it had worked, we wouldn't be talking about this right now.

Reaction, on the other hand, is one of the things that you can use to your benefit. In case of the pandemic, you have the entire scale of possible reactions, from one extreme to the other extreme. That is, from one extreme where everything locks down and people are restricted to their homes, where physical distancing is put in place before the first positive case shows up, to the other extreme where we're relying on herd immunity, and losing who we have to lose in the hopes that the survivors will have some sort of immunity. The different national restrictions represent almost everything between these two extremes.

“As soon as people get comfortable, and they learn what they're supposed to do, they adapt to this new style, and tend to overlook new announcements.”

I do think that the campaign of the spring wave of coronavirus was very successful in Hungary, but I also think that, if we would say okay, let's opt for a similar campaign in GMOs, in climate change, in globalization, in whatnot, it would simply overload everybody.

And just as you would expect it, by the second, autumn wave, the public had been overloaded with information. As soon as people get comfortable, and they learn what they're supposed to do, they adapt to this new style, and tend to overlook the new announcements. The attention to the campaign has a curve similar to that of herd immunity. So there's an incredibly steep spike, where everybody is all over the "What should I do," but then, as soon as we personally become comfortable with the idea that okay, experts are taking care of it, it just becomes a habit and a part of life. And immediately, the attention drops. So it’s important we understand that the attention span is short.

This is probably a matter of strategy, what you call "good" and what you call "bad." When the epidemic started, the main message coming from central government agencies or offices were technical instructions on what one should do to keep oneself safe in the next six hours. It wasn't about, for instance, where this virus came from, how it arrived to Hungary, what the symptoms are... it was: wear a mask if you have to go out, wash your hands, disinfect, and don't visit grandma. These were simple instructions for everybody, messages that everyone understands, everyone can relate to. If you don't have hand sanitizers, buy them here! If you don't have masks, do this!

The downside of this is that it opens up space for guesswork, and it gives room to come up with theories as to the origins of the disease. Is it really a virus, or is it the 5G towers sucking oxygen out of the air? I definitely saw an uprise in these theories where many were quick to offer their own answers on where this coronavirus came from, whether it was really natural, did it escape from a lab, was it dropped off by planes or military corps, or did the military sneak the virus into China and then pour it onto the first bat, etc., that type of stuff.

Whenever you go out to give a talk, whether it's a 90-minute presentation or a seven-minute interview, whatever you say, you have to make sure that one people shut the TV off, there is at least one sentence they remember of what you said. That's the message. That one sentence is what you're going to build your entire presentation over. This is really like writing a song. You can sing about love, you can sing about breaking up, you can sing about whatever you want to sing about, you can sing trash metal… you need a refrain people to understand and learn. And if you don't have a refrain you're not going to have a hit, because no one can identify with it. Science communication is about finding that refrain for your work. The refrain can change, obviously, because you're going to deliver a completely different presentation for a scientific audience, for a scientific audience out of your field, for the general public, for policymakers, for professionals of non-scientific areas, etc., this all influences the process. But you have to have the refrain.

“This is really like writing a song. You can sing about love, you can sing about breaking up, you can sing about whatever you want to sing about, you can sing trash metal… you need a refrain people understand and learn. And if you don't have a refrain, you're not going to have a hit, because no one can identify with it. Science communication is about finding that refrain for your work.”

The first three letters stand for Documenting those microbes that we don't know yet, Assessing the risks that they pose, and Monitoring those of high risk. The fourth letter is where I think DAMA is really doing something that has not necessarily been proposed yet. It calls for Action. Usually, the way a scientific study works is that you produce your results, you publish them in a paper, and then you think, it's now there for anyone to read. Now the reality is, very few people, other than scientists, read those papers! And in the case of epidemics, we have to understand that an epidemic does not care if you're a scientist or not. An epidemic affects everyone and anyone. It affects the economy, it affects society, it affects governments, it affects industry, it affects everything!

This is another message that needs to be delivered and understood by everyone: the way this type of preventative scientific policy-making protocol works is that if we do our job correctly, nothing happens. And if you think about it, from a communication perspective, this is a very tough sell. Because it's not Dustin Hoffman running with a vial of antibodies, and every cured patient in the world flashing as green dots. It's just you sitting in a café believing me that had we not done this and this, you would now be in a pandemic. "Yeah, right." This is one of the challenges in a project like this, in any preventative measure. You have nothing to show, because the “nothing” is your reward. The “nothing” is your outcome and your result.