It was Friday night – date night. Linda Villarreal, MD, and her husband had dinner plans. But Univision – the nationwide Spanish-language network that had sought Dr. Villarreal’s expertise on COVID-19 several times during 2021 – was two hours late calling her for a prearranged Zoom interview.
“I finally said, ‘To heck with it. I’m going to go out and have dinner,’” Dr. Villarreal recalled several months later.
But she’s president of the Texas Medical Association, and the sense of duty that has come with that position during the pandemic didn’t let her say “to heck with it” completely. She took her iPad to dinner, just in case.
Univision called “the minute we got the entrees,” Dr. Villarreal said. But a mouthful of food and a background full of restaurant patrons weren’t going to make for the best presentation. Luckily, it was her favorite restaurant, and she knew the staff there.
“I went up to the maître d’ and said, ‘Do you have a quiet, soundproof room where I can do this Zoom meeting?’ He said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ So, they put me in their wine cellar,” she said, laughing at the memory.
“What I’ve learned this year especially is, if you are going to be that go-to person, whether it’s at the community level or in my position as TMA president, I carry my iPad.”
Since the pandemic began more than two years ago, TMA has deployed go-to people in media outlets across not just the state but also the nation and even the world. TMA’s trusted distillation of important information on public health measures, vaccines, and testing has raised physician leaders’ profiles, and invited both positive attention from believers in medicine and negative attention from anti-science forces.
Most importantly, TMA’s explainers in the news have helped millions of people arm themselves with the knowledge needed to help fight COVID-19.
If you see a TMA leader interviewed or quoted on COVID-19, chances are his or her media experience didn’t begin with the pandemic. But even for physicians seasoned in working with reporters, the pandemic has been a different animal in multiple ways.
For Tyler pediatrician Valerie Smith, MD, the urgency and fluidity of all things COVID have meant more requests and far less turnaround time. The chair of TMA’s COVID-19 Task Force School Reopening Workgroup was used to getting at least a week’s notice, maybe even two, before her past media appearances. That would give her time to do all her background research on the topic and work with the society she’d be representing – TMA or the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example – to carefully craft her message.
But the public’s craving for up-to-date COVID knowledge – and the media’s role as conduit – doesn’t allow for that length of prep. That’s made it all the more important for Dr. Smith to stay on top of the latest guidelines from organizations or agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“As someone who is practicing and in clinic during the day, in addition to serving other roles and doing the work I do at TMA, sometimes reporters want comment on an article that I haven’t had the chance to read yet. That has been a particular shift for me, just that timing of everything happening at such a rapid pace, and [fast-paced] deadlines,” she said.
A similar challenge exists for Keller pediatrician Jason Terk, MD, in his media engagements – including a first for him during 2021, when he was a guest on The Podcast by KevinMD, a video series by New Hampshire internist and leading physician social media voice Kevin Pho, MD. That interview, titled “How This Physician Handles a Distorted Concept of Reality,” explored how physicians today are forced to deal with distrust of science and medicine.
“There are opportunities to push out a message which counters the anti-science voices out there. That’s another important responsibility that we have as physicians, and something that I take very personally,” Dr. Terk said.
He counts his increased visibility as a positive.
“As people have gotten more acquainted with seeing me on local media, they appreciate seeing their pediatrician talk about issues that are important to them and which are relevant to their kids,” he said. “Personally, it’s been satisfying for me because it gives me the sense that I’m being more effective than what I otherwise could be communicating only at the point of care.”
The sense of purpose has been profound for other TMA media liaisons, like El Paso infectious disease specialist Ogechika Alozie, MD. He has been a ubiquitous presence on media across the state since the pandemic began, imparting his expertise on everything from vaccine effectiveness to masking to clinical drug trials on COVID-19 antiviral medications.
“In the beginning, it was just kind of this weird feeling of, why me?” he said. “And then you start doing it and you start realizing that maybe some people are listening. And then [in terms of] my locality of El Paso more than anything else … it turned into this role of, ‘Well, if not me, who else is going to do it?’”
During the first year of the pandemic, Dr. Alozie also got a reminder – from someone he loves dearly – about how far his words can reach.
“My mom’s in Nigeria, and she called me one day crying because she saw me on CNN. That was kind of fun,” Dr. Alozie said. “That was probably the highlight of my year.”
TMA also reached an international audience during the first summer of the pandemic, when it released a COVID-19 risk chart that ranked the COVID exposure of common activities on a scale of one to 10. The worldwide thirst for that sort of information led to several international interviews for then-TMA President Diana Fite, MD.
Being a public figure, though, can also make one a public target – particularly for some of the more passionate members of, say, the anti-vaccine movement, opponents of masking or other public health measures, or those who believe COVID is simply a hoax. If the publisher of a web story or video allows comments, nastiness from those circles is more than a remote possibility. And social media can be an easy way for the anti-science crowd to find a direct line to a spokesperson for medicine.
Dallas public health physician John Carlo, MD, a member of TMA’s COVID-19 Task Force and another frequent face on statewide media, says he has “very infrequently” received direct messages from people who take severe issue with his COVID messaging.
“Part of the reason behind that is, I try to really keep a balanced point of view and be very fact- and science-based and try to stay away from anything that is too critical of any one particular audience,” he said. “My personal role is really informational in terms of the engagement with the media. I’m not there to pick a side necessarily, or to try to engage in a conversation. It’s really more informational from the standpoint that we’re bringing information on, ‘What’s the science say?’”
Staying that course and avoiding the appearance of political bias while being interviewed, comes with experience, he added. As an interviewee, he’s on guard to steer a question away from lightning-rod issues, or “anything that might be inflammatory,” and stick to the message he intends to deliver.
“You do have some selectivity in terms of having the interview in the first place. Most of the reporters know from my experience … that at this point, I’m not going to do any sort of political gamesmanship.”
The rapidly changing science related to COVID has added to the challenge of trying to make public messaging stick. That is why Dr. Villarreal is poised with what she is says the most important message to convey these days, summed up in the name of TMA’s immunization outreach program, Vaccines Defend What Matters (www.texmed.org/defendwhatmatters).
“If allowed when being interviewed, I open my statements with that, and I close my statements with that,” she said. “The more we put it out there, the less we’re going to hear about the anti-vaxxers.”
Dr. Smith has received letters and emails disagreeing with some of her positions in op-eds she’s written for Dallas Morning News. But she describes most of her interactions as positive.
“I’ve had multiple times where I’ve had patients in clinic a day or two later, and their parents have said that they saw me talking [on TV] about vaccination, or getting schools back open, or whatever the topic was, and how excited that they’ve been to see their … child’s own physician out there,” she said.
However, she admits: “I will be honest: I don’t read online comments.”
Dr. Alozie broke that cardinal rule at least once, but still found the benefits of his public presence have outweighed any risks among the naysayers.
“They say never read the comments, right? … People were vociferous against COVID, and it being fake and a setup. They were like, ‘Hey, I don’t believe this,’” he recounted. Nevertheless, “for me, … probably the second highlight of my year was that crowd not using me as the demagogue to destroy. [As if they were saying,] ‘OK, we don’t believe all of this, but we sort of trust this guy. He’s not terrible.’”
And after it occurred to Dr. Alozie early on that “maybe some people are listening,” he soon got confirmation that was the case.
“We had a lot of the hardest-hit communities for COVID back in 2020. And so, there were lot of competing priorities,” he said. “But having people either tweet, or say something on Facebook or wherever it was, and say, ‘Hey, because of you [saying] XYZ, I got vaccinated,’ or ‘I got my mom vaccinated,’ or ‘I didn’t believe in this before, but you’ve convinced me.’ Those were some of the things [where] I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is kind of cool.’”
Tex Med. 2022;118(3):28-31
April 2022
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