Could this week have seen the worst ever case of COVIDitus to infect Astra Zeneca Oxford which ha...

Now, if you think you had a bad week, imagine what it must have felt like if you ran the AstraZeneca PR this week. It started off great, but it just got worse and worse. So I'm going to share with you a case study, real live case study of how a major multinational science company really made, frankly, a series of beginner's errors in announcing their COVID-19 vaccine. All started out well with a press release on Monday the 23rd announcing the analysis of 23,000 participants in their phase 3 trial. And needless to say, CNN had them on the show very quickly. Becky Anderson had Professor Adrian Hill, director of the Oxford University Jenner Centre, on the show, and this is the buildup that she gave him. You couldn't have asked for a better pre-sales pitch than this.

News in the quest for a coronavirus vaccine. In the midst of a brutal wave of the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping much of the world, there is encouraging news on another vaccine. The drugmaker AstraZeneca and researchers at Oxford University say they have developed one that was on average 70% effective in human trials. Among the volunteers, there are no reports of hospitalizations Or severe cases of COVID-19. Well, joining us now, one of the people who helped develop this vaccine, Professor Adrian Hill of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University. And it is great to have you on, sir. This being applauded today by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, saying, and I quote, incredibly exciting news.

So this is where it was all going great guns. And let's listen to how Professor Adrian Hill Takes the opportunity with CNN.

What are you telling us today?

We're telling us— telling you that we tested 2 different immunisation regimens. One, the standard regime where you give the same dose twice, and the other, a fairly new type of regime where you increase the dose. So we started with half a dose, and then the second immunisation was with the full dose. And intriguingly, that gave very high efficacy of 90%. That was highly statistically significant. So this looks like a real result for high efficacy. And we don't fully understand that, but there are several ideas around as to how it, how it might work. And we're exploring those.

Now, Becky Anderson goes on to ask him, she says, exactly when will you know? How long will it take you to really understand what's going on in here? And Professor Hill, who's in his house, no tie, a shirt collar buckled, a brown jacket with a shadow beard, no light in front, camera height wrong, he's got a beam from his door straight through the middle of his head, he replies, probably weeks or months. So that's just a 2 minutes and 5 in a 5 and a half minute CNN interview. You couldn't have scripted it more poorly than that, to be honest. And you could see Becky Anderson becoming frankly incredulous that this person would be saying that they got these results, but he couldn't really explain the difference and went on to kind of hypothesize. Now, that in itself might have been okay, except from the same day, Manny Pangalos, who is the AstraZeneca executive vice president who heads up non-oncology research and development, explained to Reuters, another channel, that a lab error was the reason why some volunteers had received a smaller dose and the dose that proved to be 90% effective. In other words, a smaller dose, half a dose in fact, would be more effective than a full dose. So that makes you feel pretty reassured, doesn't it? Then, having gone on to undermine the credibility of the vaccine, he then says the reason we had the half dose is serendipity, adding that researchers had underpredicted the dose of the vaccine by half. Well, that's really reassuring. Thank you, Manny Pangalos. I feel good about that. So we've got two different spokespeople, both sharing information that is not consistent. With each other, but also casting doubt on the consistency of both the research and of the manufacturer.

Then on the 25th, on the Wednesday, Oxford communications manager for vaccines tells CNN that the dose selection for any new vaccine is a complicated area, and in exploring methods of dose selection, we discovered one Gave a lower dose than expected. So here we have on Tuesday AstraZeneca speaking, and on Wednesday we've got the Oxford communications manager for vaccines speaking.

So as any PR person would tell you, one spokesperson, one message. Now Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—three different days, three different channels of communication—and all saying slightly different things. Now, the—

on the 26th, so on the Thursday, AstraZeneca replies that it has hoped the world can focus on its positive vaccine news, but industry experts are fearing a lack of transparency has clouded that because when they issued their results, they talked about the 23,000 participants. But what they didn't do was to break down the nature of those participants, including the fact that in the first group that had the 90% efficacy, all of them were under 50 years old. Now Pfizer and Moderna, the other 2 that have issued their results, both published their results and included the data that backed up the results. So we have a case where the existing companies, Pfizer and Moderna, that have already gone out with their information have given, if you like, rock-solid data to back up their claims. And AstraZeneca now is beginning to look like they were just in a hurry to get their information out, that it wasn't fully tested. And as Professor Adrian Hill says, We don't fully understand, and he also says it'll probably take weeks or months.

Now by Thursday, the share price of AstraZeneca has fallen more than six percent since their announcement on Monday. So here they are planning to make over three billion doses of this vaccine.

It should have been a tonic for the share price. In fact, their handling of the communication. Has dragged their share price down. Now, on Thursday, CNN had asked AstraZeneca and Oxford to put together candidates for interviews, and both have declined. Now you have two different parties, both supposedly working together, but the fact that the media are approaching two different groups to talk about the same vaccine is a recipe, if you pardon the pun, for a disaster. As if things were not getting bad enough, on the 27th today, North Korean hackers are suspected to have carried out a cyberattack against the British coronavirus developer AstraZeneca, according to Reuters, citing 2 unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Now, you could be forgiven for thinking this is a conspiracy theory, which is what I thought at the very beginning of the week. I thought that maybe Pfizer and Moderna are trying to undermine the test results of the AstraZeneca. But having watched Professor Adrian Hill online and having seen the results of their tests, they really have almost no credibility. The only person who has given lots of praise has been Boris Johnson, who did that on the 24th. And here he is kind of reminding me of Weo's Law, which states there are nine of these about how communication will be misunderstood, but also how those people with self-interest will amplify repeat a message without even knowing whether or not it is true. So Boris Johnson, in his excitement, having a British. Champion of a COVID vaccine has unwittingly then amplified and caused even more confusion as to the validity of the AstraZeneca Oxford University vaccine. Now, I'm not a scientist nor a medical, and so I don't know who is right or wrong. But from a PR point of view, there are some lessons here that I just wanted to share. One is, if you have an announcement, make sure that it is correct. Number 2, if you have a spokesperson for an announcement. Make sure that they are media trained and prepared and give them guidelines on what they can and cannot say. And if that person is going to be live on TV, make sure that they are dressed for the part, that their, their venue is properly lit, and also that they know what not to say. People often make the mistake that a media interview is just to explain what they are being asked. Actually, the bridging technique, which we teach on a course, is all about Answering the question with what you would like to tell the audience, and Professor Adrian Hill plainly hasn't had this training. The next is, of course, that there should only be one voice for one message. So AstraZeneca and Oxford really have not looked like a unified group. They've looked like two people collaborating, and actually you wonder whether the vaccine has been invented in the same way as they've done their communication, which obviously would undermine any kind of credibility that they might have. So if you're looking at communicating and if you're looking at sharing information, especially you have a partnership, please avoid Weyl's Law. Information will be misunderstood by all of those who will receive it. So what we need to do to overcome that is to make our information simple, to make it consistent and to make sure that the spokespeople are credible, knowledgeable.

And I'm going to say that they look the part, because remember that 80% of communication is nonverbal. So for anybody watching Professor Adrian Hill in a dimly lit room in his house, we'll wonder whether this is really going to be the impression of a global solution to a global pandemic. They could have done it so much better, and maybe if anyone is listening to this podcast that knows anyone AstraZeneca, you could share this with them. I'm sure that they know that this has been a week from hell. Of course, we wish AstraZeneca and Oxford the very best with their vaccine.

We need it, but we also need for them to communicate this so that they convey a sense of confidence and competence.

And so far this week, they've started by. Issuing a great release and ended up with the specter of maybe Korean hackers.

Now that has got to be a PR week from hell. I hope you're having a better one. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, I wish you a profitable business, and that if you're going to communicate, please get it organized and do it properly.

And above all, if you're saying that you are going to deliver a result, please make sure you understand How you're going to deliver that result, when you're going to deliver that result, for whom, and when.