The Practical Guide for Health Risk Communication, which is a collaborative effort between BMJ Publishing Group, CEDARthree, Istituto Superiore di Sanità and Zadig Srl, is a main outcome of the TELL ME project. It is a collection of four guidance documents geared towards health care professionals, public health officials, decision-makers in the fields of infectious disease management and communication.The Practical Guide for Risk Communication offers practical recommendations and tools to support the development of evidence-based messages, tailored for different sub-populations and target groups across various cultural contexts with the aim to further improve risk communication and the management of national or international public health threats at different phases of a major infectious disease outbreak.
Forty-three experts highlight some key insights from the social and behavioural sciences for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and point out important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.
All medical treatments have potential harms as well as potential benefits, and it's important to be able to weigh these against each other. With vaccines, the benefits are particularly complex as they can involve benefits to others as well as to ourselves - and the harms can feel particularly acute because we take vaccines when we are healthy, as a preventative measure.
These fact boxes are supposed to help you weigh the benefits and harms of a vaccination against COVID-19. The information and numbers in this fact box represent no final evaluation. They are based on the best scientific evidence currently available. The fact boxes were created in a collaboration between the Robert Koch Institute (RKI, Berlin) and the Harding Center for Risk Literacy (University of Potsdam).
