SCIENCE science.org 29 OCTOBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6567 523ILLUSTRATION: KATTY HUERTAS
Sridhar found her voice early in the pan-
demic and didn’t hesitate to use it. “Part of
my job is speaking truth to power. And the
UK govt is (in my view) getting it wrong,” she
tweeted in March 2020, after Prime Minister
Boris Johnson announced a strategy to “take
it on the chin” rather than try to contain the
virus. In November 2020, she told a House of
Commons committee that the public’s desire
for a normal Christmas was wishful thinking:
“I have to speak bluntly. The virus does not
care if it is Christmas.”
The information gap Sridhar and others
moved to fill was carved partly by months
of poor communication from many gov-
ernments and public health agencies, says
Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill In-
stitute for National and Global Health Law
at Georgetown University. “They’ve made so
many misjudgments in terms of health com-
munication,” he says. Sridhar can “explain
what we know, what we don’t know, and
what we’re doing to find out what we don’t
know,” says Gostin, who has known her for
years. She “understands the science and she’s
able to convey it in a simple, clear, honest
way.” Many of Gostin’s British friends listen to
Sridhar over their own government, he says.
If the pandemic handed some scientists
a megaphone, it also brought a heap of new
challenges and worries. “On one hand, I’m
very privileged to have such a large plat-
form, and at the same time it’s a complete
and total exhausting shitshow,” says Angela
Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of
Saskatchewan, whose Twitter following ex-
ploded from 250 people to 250,000. For one,
scientists can easily get entangled in pan-
demic politics and suffer the consequences.
Sridhar, for example, advises (and frequently
lauds) the Scottish government led by thepro-independence Scottish National Party.
That has made her a favorite target for those
in England who oppose an independent Scot-
land. She worries whether her directness will
jeopardize her ability to secure funding in
the future. “You’re challenging the establish-
ment,” she says. “These are the people who
are sitting on all the grant panels in London.”
David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the
University of Toronto who has been a vocal
critic of some pandemic policies in Canada,
says colleagues’ responses have strained his
professional relationships. “I don’t think
my rank ordering of colleagues, in terms of
who I hold in high esteem and who I hold in
less esteem, looks anything 2 years into the
pandemic like it did at the outset,” he says.
University of Toronto pharmacologist David
Juurlink put it succinctly in a recent tweet: “I
miss the days when doctors on Twitter would
disagree without referring to each other as
human garbage.”
The wider public can be even more savage.
Like many researchers voicing strong opin-
ions, especially women, Sridhar has received
vicious online messages from those opposing
masks, lockdowns, and vaccines. “Are you an
evil nazi f---ing bitch by any chance, asking
for a friend??” a Twitter user wrote one day,
after she’d endorsed vaccinating children
against COVID-19. “Whenever I open Twit-
ter, I’m so overwhelmed by how angry it is,”
Sridhar says. She tries to think of her online
persona as an avatar onto which people proj-
ect their fears and anger and frustration. “It’s
a different universe, there’s different rules,”
she says. “It’s not real.”
Still, she was unprepared for the hate. “In
public health, we’ve always been the good
guys,” she says. Growing up in Miami as
the daughter of two physicians from India,Sridhar’s interest in health intensified
around the age of 12, when her father was
diagnosed with cancer. (He died a few years
later.) At 18, she became the youngest per-
son ever in the United States to receive a
Rhodes Scholarship to study at the Univer-
sity of Oxford, where she completed a Ph.D.
in anthropology, focusing on the link be-
tween malnutrition and infectious diseases
in India.
There is something relentlessly sunny
about her demeanor, and Sridhar has re-
tained a cheerful irreverence over the
years—she once wore flip-flops at Bucking-
ham Palace—and through COVID-19 times.
In response to the recent hate message de-
manding to know whether she was a Nazi,
Sridhar retweeted the attack and answered:
“Last time I checked ... I wasn’t. Hope
you’ll let your friend know! I do like green
smoothies, Nigella’s chocolate cake, Scot-
land’s gorgeous beaches. In case your friend
is wondering.” She ended with a hug emoji.
What will happen to these now-house-
hold names when the pandemic subsides?
Rasmussen plans to keep tweeting about
viruses, “but I do hope there’s occasion for
more tweets about obscure Beverly Hills,
90210 trivia” too.
Michael Bang Petersen, a political scien-
tist at Aarhus University, predicts many ce-
lebrity scientists will continue to speak out.
The attention may prove a career boost, he
notes, helping scientists secure promotions
and funding. Rasmussen, for example, says
she found a new job and new collaborations
through Twitter. “Without a doubt my own
work has been transformed permanently.”
Outspoken scientists also have public pos-
tures to defend, Petersen says. “In the begin-
ning, everyone was just trying to figure out
what is going on,” he says. “Now, scientists
are more and more locked into a particular
position.” He worries that will only increase,
especially if scientists try to hold on to their
followers after the pandemic. “For example,
if you have, as a scientist, built up a following
on being slightly skeptical about some of the
vaccines,” he says, “then you may continue
that focus just with other types of vaccines.”
Gostin hopes trust in public health agen-
cies will return, potentially dimming the
spotlight on now-famous scientists. “There
will always be room for these independent
voices of reason, but I hope in the future they
will be amplifying and explaining public
health agency messages rather than contra-
dicting them,” he says.
For her part, Sridhar hopes to fade into
the background. And if another pandemic
strikes? “I have a great group of younger re-
searchers. I’ll probably pass the baton to one
of them,” she says. “I feel like I’ve done my
tour of duty.” j