For 25 years, Benoît Mâsse worked in the shadows, far from the cameras, like most scientists. Biostatistician and epidemiologist, professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal, he found himself overnight in just about every media in the province explaining the complex details of a pandemic. Even I, a cultural columnist, interviewed him last fall when restaurants, theaters and libraries were closed again, and I really liked his frankness and clarity.
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PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, LAPRESSE
Benoît Mâsse, epidemiologist
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But how do you tame the media beast when you have had no training in this direction? Benoît Mâsse was the most cited specialist in Press last year, closely followed by his colleagues Roxane Borgès Da Silva, Gaston De Serres, Caroline Quach, Karl Weiss and Anne Gatignol. He could never have imagined such a year in the spotlight when in January 2020, he reluctantly agreed to do an interview at 24/60 with Anne-Marie Dussault, on a completely different subject: he had participated in studies on the Ebola virus and on HIV which had just been listed among the 20 discoveries of the decade of National Geographic.
I almost said no, because it was live. It was my girlfriend who convinced me. I arrived long in advance because I was afraid of being late and on the spot I wondered why I was there and if I shouldn’t push myself! But it went really well.
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Benoît Mâsse
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Then the pandemic arrived. Of course, as an epidemiologist, he saw the danger coming a little before everyone else. A colleague had written to him in February that he had to prepare to “stay locked up for a long time”. But if he decided to embark on the task of popularizing scientific facts daily for a general public, it is in particular to pay tribute to the advice of his friend Gita Ramjee, eminent researcher from South Africa with whom he worked. since the 1990s and which strongly encouraged him to go into the field. “It was she who made me understand that if you want to have an impact when there is an epidemic or a problem that affects an entire region or a country, you have to talk to the population, because if it do not embark, it is impossible. This is the key. She convinced me that you shouldn’t stay in your office doing calculations. You have to get involved, explain and listen to concerns. At first, I was wrong – it’s not easy to explain randomization to villagers, for example – but she told me not to be discouraged, that I was going to learn. ”
However, at the end of March, Gita Ramjee was swept away by COVID-19, the darkest moment of the pandemic for Benoît Mâsse. “I found it exceedingly difficult. My instinct was to tell myself that it was coming to Quebec and that we were going to suffer. When it starts to affect people who know how to protect themselves and how it spreads… It told me that the asymptomatic transmission that we feared was real. I’m more used to moving to Africa. But there, it was happening in my backyard and there are not enough of us in science in Quebec to allow us to leave. ”
Benoît Mâsse therefore accepted the interviews, began to write articles in French while everything is done in English in his profession. Because the sinews of war during an epidemic is information and the support of the population. It was his duty. We only have to see what happens when the message does not get through, as in the United States, where there have been nearly 400,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic. “The worst thing about their situation is that it is a country that had the resources and the means to face the pandemic,” he laments. It could have happened so differently. ”
The necessary alliance
If there are two areas that have been attacked for a good decade, it is science and journalism. This global crisis has strengthened their collaboration. Benoît Mâsse has been worried for a long time about disinformation and the growing mistrust of science, but he understands the phenomenon. “We have some responsibility in this, we scientists,” he believes. Several things have been allowed to go for a long time. In the last 15 years there has been a proliferation of science journals that I call pseudo-science journals. They understood that researchers must publish to survive and they will publish no matter what you write. This results in a lot of publications that look scientific, but are worthless. So it is certain that on the public side, when we are looking for information, it is very difficult to navigate. When someone quotes you from a study, it looks so real! There is good science being done, there is no doubt about it, but it’s drowned in so much background noise that we let it go. ”
At the beginning, Benoît Mâsse felt a lot of pressure by being among the first specialists to answer questions, before the pool of stakeholders grew. He had to learn to live with the attacks. “I’m not on social media, but there are people who end up finding your email address. People, for example, who are having their stores closed. And it can become personal attacks. It was pretty intense that at the end of April I told my dean that I wanted to take a break because I was worried about my family. There are those who imagined that the confinement was my fault, that I wanted us to suffer in Quebec and who were angry with me! When you’re not used to it, that’s when you tell yourself that it’s not easy to be exposed to the public. But there were still plenty of people asking legitimate questions and I always tried to answer when it was on my mind. ”
Because that’s how he sees his function in the media: to fill in the holes left by government press briefings. As for the work of journalists, he assesses it positively. He sensed from the start that they were trying to figure out precisely what was going on. “It is clear that they now understand well the dynamics of transmission of a virus, we no longer have to explain it and that allows them to be more critical when the government proposes something. Afterwards, I explained more about the vaccination campaigns. We feel that journalists have a good understanding of the issues. ”
The other positive aspect in this crisis is the international collaboration between scientists who usually are very competitive with each other. According to Benoît Mâsse, this is unheard of and he would not have bet last March on the rapid arrival of vaccines. The discoveries are daily, so it is practically impossible to take a vacation without reading the studies if we want to follow the development of knowledge about COVID-19, he says.
The pandemic has changed us all, Benoît Mâsse first. Over the course of the interviews, he improved his self-confidence, discovered that he loved to write articles in French – “I don’t know why I waited so long” -, but what is very nice with him is his concern for the morale of the population in general. That’s why he agreed to write the sanitary protocol of … Big Brother Celebrities! ” We need entertainment, and local entertainment, not just American and Netflix! he emphasizes, welcoming the return of hockey. It’s important for our mental health, to temporarily forget that we are confined until February 8 and that we cannot go out after 8 p.m. Finally, if he warns us that the next few weeks will be the most difficult, he reminds us that we are really seeing the end of the tunnel, with the vaccines. “Deaths and hospitalizations will go up, but I have no doubts that we will be in a much better position in April. We will have succeeded in protecting the most vulnerable. The virus will still circulate in Quebec, but with much less consequences. We can gradually deconfin. And I would say that we risk having a great summer. Word of scientist.
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