Via the Columbia Journalism Review: Why the coronavirus and election stories will be hard to untangle. Excerpt:
Last week, the pandemic continued not to respect editors’ and politicians’ priorities. The day after Election Day, the US recorded more than 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19—the first time any country had surpassed that daily rate. The same day, Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, tested positive for the disease; he tried to keep his diagnosis under wraps, but the public found out about it on Friday via Bloomberg, which has become a preeminent source on the White House petri-dish beat.
The day before Meadows’s positive test, he visited Trump’s campaign HQ and then attended a White House election party; according to Yamiche Alcindor, of PBS, aides feared the election party would be a COVID superspreader, but felt pressured to show up. The Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who also attended the party, has now tested positive for COVID; so, too, has David Bossie, who is spearheading Trump’s post-election legal fight.
Back on the macro level, the US beat its own daily record for confirmed cases on Thursday, then again on Friday, then again on Saturday. By Sunday, the country had recorded its ten-millionth confirmed case.
Records aside, this was all grimly repetitive; for months now, the COVID story has been a ceaseless cycle of infection, death, and administration fecklessness. Yesterday, however, felt like a possible inflection point, as two developments gave news consumers possible glimpses of light at the end of the tunnel.
First, Joe Biden, the president-elect, unveiled a thirteen-member COVID task force that will help guide his pandemic response. Several of its members will be familiar to news junkies—Atul Gawande is a staff writer at the New Yorker, while Vivek Murthy, Michael Osterholm, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Celine Gounder all appear regularly on TV—but not in the “Trump-Fox-feedback-loop” sense to which we’ve all become accustomed. (A Biden-New Yorker feedback loop would be an interesting thought experiment, but still not a good way to run an administration.)
The Washington Post covered the task force under a headline—“Biden announces coronavirus task force made up of physicians and health experts”—that, as the journalist and CJR contributor Gabriel Snyder noted, was overwhelming in its normality, “like reading ‘Dog Bites Man’ after a long spell cowering in fear about a crazy man who was going around biting everyone’s dogs.”
Biden also held a press briefing and called on all Americans to wear masks, a presidential invocation of science that CNN’s Sanjay Gupta called “surreal.” Presidential invocations of bleach—which are actually surreal—will soon be a thing of the past.
Also yesterday, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made a big announcement: according to an early analysis, a vaccine that the company has been developing with BioNTech, a German drugmaker, was more than ninety-percent effective among trial volunteers, with no serious safety concerns observed.
Sarah Zhang—a science writer at The Atlantic who warned recently that it can be hard to tell what’s significant and what isn’t amid an unprecedented, dizzying flood of vaccine news—called the Pfizer announcement a “*big deal*”; around the world, medical experts debated the announcement, and reporters, as CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, “zigzagged between optimism and caution.”
There were grounds for both: the ninety-percent finding was surprising and hopeful, but it’s not yet clear how long immunity from the vaccine lasts, and Pfizer has yet to show its work. (It made its announcement in a press release, not a peer-reviewed journal.) Even if all is well scientifically, we’re left with the thorny questions of production, distribution, and uptake.
Still, appropriately nuanced coverage is always grounds for optimism; science, after all, is naturally zigzaggy. There’s reason to hope that Biden, as president, will drive fewer—and less anguished—COVID headlines than Trump has done, leaving more space in our collective attention span for the scientific method to play out in public.
