38 Scientific American, March 2022
W
hen I fIrst heard the reports of a “myste-
rious pneumonia” spreading in Wuhan,
China, in January 2020, I thought I would
write a story or two about it and move on to the
next big medical news development. As a health
journalist, disease outbreaks are not a rare occur-
rence on my beat, and most do not rise to the level
of an international emergency. But the story of
COVID-19 would turn out to be unlike anything I
had covered before or am likely—I hope—to ever
cover again.
Reporting on the pandemic was like building a
plane while flying it—at warp speed in a hurricane.
The underlying science was evolving daily, so there
was no expert consensus or body of established
research to draw on. And there were plenty of peo-
ple willing to exploit this information vacuum, cre-
ating a secondary epidemic of misinformation.
Early on Chinese authorities suppressed informa-
tion about the virus, and the Trump administration
downplayed its threat to the U.S. Testing blunders
and shortages prevented this country from recogniz-
ing the number of COVID cases circulating within its
borders in the critical early phase when we could
have slowed its spread. And for months health
authorities said SARS-CoV-2 was spread primarily by
symptomatic people through large respiratory drop-
lets from a cough or a sneeze or by contaminated sur-
faces (remember the now ridiculous-seeming grocery-
disinfecting ritual?). That guidance was based on
how some other respiratory diseases circulate, but of
course we now know this novel coronavirus com-
monly spreads through aerosols that linger in the air,Science
Journalism
Shifted with
New Realities
It is no longer possible to separate
science and politicsBy Tanya Lewis
often exhaled by a person showing no symptoms at all.
At the heart of science journalism is a focus on evi-
dence. But one of the hardest lessons many other jour-
nalists and I learned while reporting on COVID is that
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—and
that even advice from renowned public health author-
ities should sometimes be questioned. Take face masks,
for example: in the pandemic’s first crucial weeks, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
World Health Organization said the public did not need
to wear masks (despite the fact that medical workers
and many people in Asia use them routinely to protect
against respiratory diseases). At the same time, cdc and
WHO officials specifically told people not to buy high-
quality respirator masks because health-care workers
needed them—breeding confusion and mistrust.
At the time, I debated with my editor over whether
to recommend that people wear masks, against the
guidance of these esteemed health agencies. I resisted
doing so, in part out of deference to these authorities
and in part because of a lack of published studies that
masks—especially nonmedical ones—were protective
for the wearer. In retrospect, I should have followed the
precautionary principle; in the absence of direct evi-
dence, masks were a reasonable precaution to protect
against a respiratory virus. That episode highlighted for
me just how challenging it can be when the evidence is
shifting in real time and even the experts can’t keep up.
It wasn’t until two years into the pandemic that the cdc
and others finally started to emphasize the importance
of high-filtration masks, which had been abundantly
available in the U.S. for many months.
It didn’t take long for bad actors to weaponize the
confusion to spread misinformation. Patient zero in this
“infodemic” was Donald Trump. The former president
routinely downplayed the virus’s severity, calling it “no
worse than the flu.” He blamed China, stoking xenopho-
bia rather than urging people to protect themselves and
others. He mocked people who wore masks, politiciz-
ing a basic public health measure, while promoting
baseless COVID treatments. It wasn’t just Trump—Fox
News personalities and celebrities such as Joe Rogan
and Aaron Rodgers have used their platforms to spread
falsehoods about the virus and the vaccines. As a health
journalist, my job was no longer purely about explain-
ing the science—I now had to contend with politics and
human behavior. Actions as seemingly innocuous as
wearing a mask or getting a vaccine to avoid getting a
disease had become political statements.
There has perhaps been no more consequential or
bitter battleground in the U.S. epidemic than vaccines.
The anti-vax movement—a small faction but already a
potent force before COVID—took advantage of people’s
hesitancy about the speed with which the new vaccines
were developed to spread lies and misinformation about
their effects. COVID anti-vaxxers promoted their dan-
gerous claims under the guise of “freedom,” never
acknowledging that it comes at the cost of people’s lives
and the freedom to live without threat of a deadly virus.