October 2026 • PharmaTimes Magazine • 16-17
VISION4HEALTH
Look who’s talking
Jess has an illuminating chat with Moderna’s Director of Communications Emma Gilgunn-Jones
We’ve asked in this column, again and again, which channel matters most, TikTok or LinkedIn? Journalists or influencers? But in this month’s conversation with Emma Gilgunn-Jones, Director of Communications at Moderna, our discussion moved past channels and onto a different question: who should actually be delivering the message.
Your audience is deafened
For decades, comms was a volume game. We produced information and pushed it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. That era is over. Now everyone is drowning in content, and everyone – patients, clinicians, journalists – is running a constant filter: what deserves my attention, and can I trust it?
That, says Emma, is what has turned communications into an exercise in curation and noise control. In healthcare specifically, this means making credible information easy to find, easy to understand and easy to act on. But this is by no means an easy task.
A career across the whole landscape
Emma has developed this perspective over a career that has moved through nearly every corner of the health comms world. This woman has done it all! She started in a scientific organisation, working on media relations for the Beagle 2 Mars mission, where she developed an early interest in storytelling and public engagement.
From there: Cancer Research UK’s press office, joining just as Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer diagnosis dominated headlines, and working across stop-smoking campaigns, cancer awareness initiatives and drug discovery. Then five years at the Health Protection Agency (now UKHSA), spanning meningitis, TB, the London Olympics and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
By the time she took the top comms job at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, she was handling some of healthcare’s most charged topics: from abortion access and menopause care to workforce pressures and pregnancy services.
When she moved to Moderna, she says the shift felt smaller than she’d assumed it might. “The fundamentals of good healthcare communications remain the same wherever you work.” Government, charity and industry operate differently, but the public, journalists and healthcare professionals you’re communicating with are largely the same
The messenger matters more than the logo
Across all these roles, Emma has noticed that audiences don’t tend to evaluate information based solely on which organisation produced it. It’s more nuanced than that – they’ll judge whether it feels accurate, relevant and credible.
That might sound obvious, but the fact is that comms teams still rarely spend enough time working out who their audience actually trusts to explain complicated things.
Sometimes that trusted voice is a clinician. Sometimes a patient advocate, a community leader or a social media creator.
Take Stay on Track, a Moderna campaign built to raise awareness of vaccine eligibility among people with a BMI above 40. Instead of relying only on traditional health channels, the team worked with creators who’d already built credibility with their audience through content about healthcare access and everyday life. Most weren’t health influencers at all. And that was very deliberate.
Alongside the creators, Moderna brought in patient organisation Obesity UK from the earliest stages of development, shaping language, imagery and creative decisions throughout. That early involvement meant the campaign was built on trust from the outset, rather than trying to establish it once everything was already finished.
Trust is shared, not owned
That campaign example led us to a bigger conversation about collaboration. Emma’s view is one that many readers of this column will share, and that’s that the best healthcare campaigns rarely sit with one organisation alone.
‘Customer-facing teams need practical, real-world learning that translates system change into confident, credible action’
Industry, government, the NHS, regulators, academia, patient groups and community voices each bring their own form of credibility – and in areas like vaccine confidence, where the challenge is bigger than any single brand, all of them are needed.
This is a useful corrective to the instinct to treat trust as something an organisation can simply claim for itself. Trust can’t be claimed; it is built when the right partners are involved early, when information is transparent, and when audiences can see their concerns have genuinely been heard rather than logged and moved past.
How do we explain the science without pretending it’s simple?
A different question I was keen to put to Emma was around the challenges facing her team in vaccine communications, a space where misinformation and mistrust seem particularly prevalent at the moment.
We know that public awareness of how vaccines are developed is higher than before the pandemic, but interestingly, that awareness hasn’t necessarily translated into confidence. In some cases, it has surfaced new questions and new anxieties.
One persistent misconception from the pandemic is that speed of vaccine development meant that corners were cut. Emma’s approach is to meet audiences where they are on this and explain the process carefully: timelines were compressed because of urgent public health need, but medicines and vaccines still went through regulatory review and scrutiny, with ongoing monitoring continuing after approval.
In this setting, trust, she says, is cumulative. It’s earned gradually through consistent transparency: acknowledging uncertainty where it exists, publishing evidence, signposting to credible sources and communicating how today’s understanding may develop tomorrow.
Correcting the record isn’t enough
The same principle applies to misinformation. Organisations can and should correct inaccuracies, but Emma is clear that no single organisation can solve the problem alone.
Comms teams have a role in monitoring concerns, providing accurate information, supporting fact-checkers – such as Full Fact – and working with journalists, but they also need to recognise where other voices will be more effective.
That’s where specialist health and science journalism remains particularly valuable. Even as news consumption fragments across social platforms, credible journalism still interrogates evidence and produces content that travels across formats.
In an increasingly AI-mediated information environment, those credible sources matter so much more.
Where this leaves us
Looking back over the conversation, the throughline was that whether we’re thinking about influencers, vaccine comms, misinformation or channel selection, what really matters is an understanding of what people are worried about, who they believe and how to make credible information easier to receive.
So, for your next campaign plan: start with partners. Who does your audience actually trust? Who are you bringing to the table, and why? How will the collaboration genuinely benefit them, not just you? And can you get them involved early enough to help shape the work, not just deliver it?
Let me know how you get on! Until next month, Jess
Jess Farmery is Senior Account Director, Health at Lexington Communications
PharmaTimes
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