Dr Xand van Tulleken: Camps, Cameras and Coronavirus - how not to communicate in a crisis

Summary

Dr Xand van Tulleken’s lecture explores how stories and images shape public understanding of medicine, humanitarian aid, and crises. His central point is that well-intentioned institutions can cause harm or obscure complex realities when they rely on simplified narratives. Good communication, he argues, should make room for nuance and people’s humanity.

Humanitarian aid and the stories told about it

• Medical authority has a history. Van Tulleken connects the public-health reforms following London’s 1858 “Great Stink” with the General Medical Act, which established professional regulation through the General Medical Council. He notes a tension in medicine’s origin story: regulation was justified by patient safety, even though there was limited evidence at the time that doctors could reliably help patients. Nevertheless, regulation helped create a body of practice that could develop into modern evidence-based medicine.
• Aid can help people while also contributing to harmful systems. Drawing on his work in Darfur, he describes how medical teams treated infections, malaria, malnutrition, and other conditions, saving lives. At the same time, aid organizations’ presence helped draw displaced people into large camps. He argues that the camps could make people more vulnerable to government control and violence, even though the aid itself was intended to help.
• Success metrics can conceal failures. Organizations could count patients treated and lives saved, but had few ways to measure whether their presence was also making people vulnerable or helping governments manage displacement.
• Narratives can be manipulated. Van Tulleken says Sudan’s government helped shift attention from its own role in violence toward stories of tribal conflict and internal disputes. Those accounts made the situation seem confusing and less compelling to distant audiences, even when the government remained a central actor.
• Images of aid can flatten people into stereotypes. The familiar picture of a white doctor helping a helpless child may raise funds, but it can obscure the complicated role of aid workers and the agency of the people receiving assistance. In his view, bearing witness and helping people tell their stories can be as important as delivering services.
• Camps are not automatically humanitarian solutions. He describes camps that provide shelter and services but also serve political purposes: containing refugees, limiting their movement, or providing controlled sources of labor. He gives examples from Jordan, Myanmar, Kenya, and the camps near Calais and Dunkirk. The stated purpose of assistance, he argues, does not by itself explain what a camp does in practice.
• People’s aims matter. In Calais, for example, immediate needs included warmth, food, shelter, and health care, while many people’s longer-term goal was to reach the UK, where they had family or expected a better welcome. Asking only what aid is needed can miss what people are trying to achieve.
• Aid requires political awareness. In the Q&A, he explains that humanitarian organizations may need to maintain neutrality when assistance could affect the course of a conflict. He encourages scrutiny and improvement of aid work while emphasizing that organizations such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders continue to provide vital help in difficult circumstances.

Science communication and Operation Ouch!

Van Tulleken credits his father’s playful demonstrations with inspiring his curiosity about the body. More broadly, he argues that science and medicine benefit from creativity, humor, and a willingness to question ordinary ways of looking at things.

He says Operation Ouch! is not primarily intended to instruct children to live more healthily. Its aims are to help them:

• Become less frightened if they are injured or need medical treatment.
• Understand and feel curious about their bodies.
• Recognize that bodies differ.
• Approach clinical procedures as strange or fascinating rather than simply terrifying.

The show uses vivid, sometimes gross demonstrations, connects them to real anatomy or biology, and lets children become familiar with medical equipment and procedures before encountering them in stressful circumstances.

As an example, he shows footage of using an endoscope to view his mouth, throat, vocal cords, windpipe, and nasal structures. The demonstration is deliberately funny and unpleasant-looking, but it reveals normal anatomy and helps make scopes less mysterious.

He also describes Operation Ouch! as a collaborative production involving doctors and a wider television team. Together, they develop experiments and connect them to scientific ideas, such as using an experiment to introduce enzymes.

Communicating during COVID-19

• Van Tulleken describes making simple public-information films during lockdown, including explanations of rules and isolation. He says this gave him a new appreciation of the need for clear information when adults themselves are facing unfamiliar situations.
• He recounts being hospitalized with COVID-19 and expresses deep gratitude to the doctors and nurses who treated him.
• His view of lockdown is deliberately nuanced: he supported it, but says it also caused serious harm and distress. He argues that public-health communication should acknowledge those costs and avoid treating every criticism of lockdown as disrespect for health workers.
• In a related Q&A, he cautions against relying on overly simplistic slogans about measures such as vaccines and masks. Even when supporting a public-health measure, communicators should recognize complexity and avoid assuming that slogans alone will persuade people.

Other points raised in the Q&A

• Children’s health: Weight and well-being are shaped substantially by circumstances such as poverty, inequality, food availability, and opportunities for physical activity—not simply by individual choices.
• Humanitarian work and the arts: Practical aid matters, but play, storytelling, and shared cultural activities can also restore dignity and bring people together. Van Tulleken cites the example of a clown performing for refugees in Lesbos.
• Careers in humanitarian work: He describes humanitarian work as a demanding but possible career path, while noting that career structures and family circumstances can make field work more difficult.

Speakers and sources featured

Speakers

• Ana Costa Prada — Director of Imperial College London’s Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication; introduced the event and moderated the Q&A.
• Dr Xand van Tulleken — Main speaker.
• Audience members — Asked questions during the Q&A. Named questioners included Fiona, James, Deborah, Iona, Vicky, Jane, Scarlett, Eloise, Malcolm, Harry, Bruno, and others.

People and sources mentioned

• Dr Chris van Tulleken — Xand’s twin brother and Operation Ouch! colleague; narrates the endoscope footage.
• Dr Ronx — Mentioned in the introduction as an Operation Ouch! colleague; the auto-generated captions render the name unclearly.
• Michel Foucault — Quoted on criticizing institutions that appear neutral or benevolent.
• David Spiegelhalter — Cited in a discussion of how different methods of counting COVID-19 deaths compare.
• William Carlos Williams — Quoted on the value of poetry and the arts.
• Kierkegaard or Kafka — One is tentatively credited in the captions with the idea that death gives meaning to life; the attribution is unclear in the recording.

Organizations and works referred to include the General Medical Council, Doctors of the World, Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, the Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children, Care, World Vision, Shelter, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Olympus, and Banksy.