11. News and Social Media Misinformation
Whether it’s WhatsApp overseas, Facebook, Parsel or right-wing TV and news sites in America, misinformation about the novel coronavirus was rampant and not easily managed. Not surprisingly, it’s been hard to tame a public health crisis when the public cannot separate fact from utter fiction and will believe whatever is on their social media feeds.
12. Global Virus Race and Operation Warp Speed
Several countries including the U.S., Australia, India and China were in a race all year to develop vaccines. Trump’s White House created Operation Warp Speed to provide federal dollars to help develop and distribute vaccines. While Pfizer didn’t get any federal money for its vaccine developed in partnership with BioNTech, it did receive money for distribution and became the first to receive an emergency use authorization for its vaccine. This was a historic achievement — one that Trump also deserves credit for since he relentlessly pushed for a vaccine knowing that it was his political lifeline — by scientists who displayed remarkable urgency, expertise and ingenuity by developing a vaccine in just 11 months after a new virus made 2020 a living hell.
Over the years, vaccination rates have been declining in America and other Western nations in part because of strong anti-vaxxer movements. But the hope is that if enough distribution of these vaccines is smooth, that faith in science more generally may be renewed — a tall task given how politicized Covid-19 has become with sections of the population believing it’s simply a hoax. Given past history, getting the trust of Black communities to get them inoculated will be a challenge. Separately, the months-long speed of the Covid-19 vaccine development and potential approval also engenders a perfectly reasonable and uncomfortable question — why, then, did it take years to develop and approve a vaccine for Ebola, which ravaged Africa?
13. The Failure and Muzzling of the CDC
Director of the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on Nov. 19, 2020. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski, Getty Images
If there is a symbol for the capitulation of science to base political interest, look no further than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An agency created to manage a public health crisis made its first blunder in error-prone testing kits that it developed marking the beginning of a testing debacle that the country hasn’t yet recovered from. But perhaps worse than that were confusing guidance, and later the revelations that Trump’s White House and political appointees ran roughshod over expert opinion and slowly but surely muzzled the organization.
14. Doctors/Experts on Twitter
Though Twitter has seen an influx of “armchair epidemiologists” sharing their opinions on pandemic data, there has been a concerted effort by physicians and public health experts to share accurate information online especially to counter the narrative from the White House. For example, Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of UCSF’s department of medicine, has shared regular “COVID Chronicles” on what the hospital is seeing in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, Tara Smith, a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University, has written about the challenges Covid-19 will pose to rural communities, and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has shared what to expect from a vaccine.
15. Conversational AI
Even last year, AI chatbots largely elicited skepticism from the healthcare industry. But Covid-19 has propelled conversational AI to the top of the food chain. Many health systems adopted chatbots as a way to triage the anxious hordes that were flocking to websites to understand whether they were experiencing Covid-like symptoms and needed to go to the ER, be tested, hospitalized or quarantined.