Job descriptions don’t convey a certain type of pressure. Gabriella Stern is well aware of it. She worked as the director of communications for the World Health Organization for over six years, navigating the challenging task of communicating effectively to a frightened, divided, multilingual world. She brought that experience to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on April 30, where she sat down for a fireside chat that felt more like a quiet confrontation with all the mistakes that public health communication still makes than a seminar.
Clarisza Runtung, an MPH candidate, moderated the live-streamed event at the Harvard Chan Studio on Huntington Avenue in Boston. She asked questions that are typically avoided in more formal settings. Stern did not sidestep. She discussed COVID-19 and what it was like to be the person writing messages about a virus that no one had ever seen before, as the death toll increased and public confidence in institutions began to erode. It’s difficult to avoid staring at that picture for a while. A disease that has yet to be named. audiences in dire need of assurance. And a communications team that needed to make a significant statement before science caught up.
Even though Stern’s biography is impressive, it’s not the only thing that makes this discussion worthwhile. It’s the particular subject matter she addressed, such as outbreaks of infectious diseases, humanitarian crises, and significant reductions in public health funding, and the direct admission that messaging in such circumstances is never clear-cut or straightforward. Speaking with communicators who have held comparable positions gives the impression that the field has long underestimated how much trust influences whether any message is received at all. Stern appeared to have an innate understanding of that, shaped by years of working in a setting where one mistake could cost much more than credibility.
This discussion comes at a time when the Harvard Opinion Research Program and the Public Health Communications Collaborative are quietly conducting some of the most grounded research in the field. Their hour-long, in-depth interviews with about two dozen American adults about how people actually find and use health information have yielded something more uncommon than data.
They have created texture. Real people talking about real moments when public health messaging failed to reach them, as well as real confusion and mistrust. An action guide created especially for communicators employed by overworked, underfunded organizations was informed by the findings. It’s titled “Overcoming Challenges and Leveraging Strengths,” and the title alone reveals something truthful about the real working conditions of the majority of communicators.
That guide was created by fifty public health communicators from fifty different agencies across the country. Their experiences are similar to everything Stern discussed on a global scale: the difficulty of carrying out demanding communication work without sufficient teams or infrastructure, and the discrepancy between what institutions want to say and what audiences are actually ready to hear. Even though it’s still unclear if the field is progressing quickly enough to close that gap, incidents like the Harvard fireside chat at least bring the issue up.
Beyond a single incident, Stern’s attendance at Harvard reflects a growing demand that global health communication be given the same rigorous intellectual consideration as epidemiology or policy. Finding words that are soothing without being deceptive and informative without being overpowering is a task that has repercussions. actual ones. There is a sense that the field is gradually, cautiously starting to take its own craft seriously as you watch this specific conversation take place, with a retired WHO director speaking with the candor that only comes after you’ve left the institution.
What emerged from that room on Huntington Avenue is something that every public health communicator working today should take the time to discuss. Stern asked better questions than most, not because she knew everything.
