RE: Roy Lilley's piece this morning (2 parts)11 Nov 2020 07:37
(Part 2)
The show was over. The markets made a fortune. Airline shares took-off and Zoom shares, that had zoomed up, zoomed down. People made a killing out of the hint that there might be a way to stop Covid-19 killing people.
When the dust settles we will find; we might have an impractical vaccine, with nightmare logistics.
This is an RNA vaccine and previously, none have been approved for use in humans. This is new territory.
Let's hope Astra-Zeneca and Oxford uni come up with something simpler. There are ten products in phase-three trials. Please hurry up.
This was a blatant propaganda exercise to give the nation some hope. But here we are, a couple of days later and reality sets in.
No10 press office is not much good at the best of times and this was not their best time.
There are four rules for managing expectations and they broke them all.
1. Don’t raise expectations without all the facts, the whole truth and certainty. Otherwise you’ll be left dealing with disappointment and mis-trust.
2. Don’t make assumptions. This press debacle was built on assumptions. 'Assumptions', assume everyone has the same understanding of the situation, as everyone else. They don’t. The confused messaging made it worse; we have a vaccine but we don’t, it works, well it might. We can all have it, but we can’t. It’s available, but it isn’t.
3. Communicate frequently and then do it again. It builds trust. Nichola Sturgeon does it every day. BoJo only ever pops up and thumps the table when things are bad and getting worse. And, he has a trust issue. Remember; ‘it’s ok to shake hands’, ‘oven ready-Brexit-deal’, ‘world-class’, ‘millions-a-week for the NHS’ and whack-a-mole.
4. Avoid push-back. It is a fine line between being optimistic and realistic, the three-men-in-the-pub lurched between; 'it’s going to be lovely' and 'this is miles away'. There was no coordinated, synchronised, balance to the message. It was Punch and Judy. We are left wondering, who was right.
This was a press briefing about a pharma company who may have a product. We hope so but that's all it was.
Hope is more than a conviction that, it’ll be ok. Hope is the certainty that something makes sense…
In the meantime, none of us is safe until we are all safe. Nothing changes. The message is the same; wear, wash-n-don’t-go.
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Kind of sums up where we really are. And why I'll keep holding BRH.
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