Bad Press
How the media manufactures consent in the COVID era
Episode FIVE.
Note: We had some audio recording and technical issues with this episode but overall pulled through thanks to the painstaking work of our amazing mixer/sound designer/musician, Alexandria Maillot.
News outlets are one of the key ways public health information is delivered to the masses. Most people aren’t reading peer reviewed research or checking published data. They get a lot of what they know about public health from what’s in the news.
But what’s in the news—and the way it’s talked about—is not always clear or accurate. Power influences what gets published and how. As the old adage goes: “the job of journalism is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”. Too often it’s forgotten.
This episode tracks how the media has contributed to the alarming decline of public health and played a role in blocking meaningful understanding and action on COVID.
What is reported and how it's framed can have a huge impact on what people think and how they behave. And if public health leaders are the ones sending foggy messages through unquestioning journalists, it becomes difficult to address collective health threats—now and in the future.
The interplay between public health institutions, politicians, and the media is so powerful it affects who suffers, who survives, and who doesn’t. And with the certainty of future pandemics coming along, honest and clear news media that serves the public can be a lifeline. It’s long past time to change the COVID narrative. It has changed before!
Featured guests are journalist, Julia Doubleday, of The Gauntlet, and Kayli Jamieson, researcher and science communicator as well as former COVID-19 technical lead at the WHO, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove.
Poster by Corina Dross, 2014 (www.corinadross.com). Created as a fundraiser for Ferguson protestors. Image used with permission.
RESOURCES
The Sick Times e.g. The Color of Long Covid series; A brief oral history of maskblocks 3-part series, Britta Shoot
Capital B News e.g. “New COVID Vaccine Guidance Could Hit Black Georgians Hardest” Alyssa Johnson
The Tyee’s health coverage- Michelle Gamage, Andrew Nikiforuk
Mother Jones’ disability reporting - Julia Metraux
New Feeling “COVID is (STILL) a Working Class Issue”, Michael Rancic
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EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT
BAD PRESS: HOW THE MEDIA MANUFACTURES CONSENT IN THE ERA OF COVID.
DANIELLA: Wanna hear a mystery?More than 10 years ago, I was working at my first real job at YouthCO HIV & Hep C Society. It’s a harm reduction and sexual health organization that was housed in a creaky office in downtown Vancouver, close to Granville Skytrain Station if you know where that is.
There were more pigeons than staff at that address. I was definitely pooped on more than once on my way in to work.
Anyway. A postal worker stomped up the wooden staircase and passed me a large yellow envelope, hand-addressed with my full name. There was no return address and the only thing inside was a folded up piece of glossy paper.
Interested, I unfolded it.
It was a poster.
On it was an image of three Black protesters. One was holding a molotov, two others were helping him light it against a backdrop of police officers. There was red text in the foreground that read: “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving those doing the oppressing” – Malcolm X
This is from a speech he made in 1964 titled “At the Audubon”.
Before the quote on the poster he also says, “The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press.”I hung the poster at my desk and held onto it for years. It’s never stopped being relevant.
Hello and welcome to Public Health is Dead. I’m Daniella, your host. If you’re new here, this show is about the decline of public health in the era of COVID.
It’s for people who feel let down by public health as we know it, people worried about the dumpster fire in disease control right now, and people who know our health is fundamental to anything else we’re fighting for.
There are better ways to take care of each other and our kids.
This is a bit of a longer episode but it’s been a while, we have things to say!Today – the media. How it shapes the narratives we tell, what we understand, how we remember events and the role it plays in propaganda. (Propaganda is just any information used to influence or persuade).
Specifically, we’ll be talking about the media’s role in shaping our perception of COVID, risk, and taking precautions at different points in time.The media reflects our current moment back to us. Our culture (and the dominant narrative, or what we believe based on the information we receive) is significantly dictated by the media we consume.
What do I mean by “the media”? It’s all the channels for communicating information to the masses that can reach and influence people. That includes newspapers, television, radio, magazines, the internet – social media and even podcasts would qualify too.
The interplay between the media, the government, business, and public health is a complex feedback loop. They feed into each other. And the media is powerful in influencing how we think about public health.
Remember ads for cigarettes? Maybe you don’t. I don’t.But there was a massive advertising and public relations effort from tobacco companies that went into pushing cigarettes onto people – even after links to cancer had been made. This is the biggest example of health manipulation in the media in public health school.
Check out this radio ad:
“Yes, according to these nationwide surveys, more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. Friends, smoke the cigarette so many doctors enjoy. Change to camels for 30 days and see how mild, how flavourful, how enjoyable a cigarette can be”
Sung Camel jingle: “How mild, how mild, how mild can a cigarette be? Make the Camel 30-day change and you’ll see. How mild, how mild, how mild can a cigarette be? Smoke Camels and see!”
Wild, right?
But this can change. It did change!Since 1989, cigarette ads have been broadly banned in Canada, and you might have seen the graphic pictures now on each pack showing damage to the body caused by smoking. The government finally acknowledged the negative effects of smoking on people’s health. And that changed the media landscape. Which also influenced how people related to smoking.
While there are definitely differences, I think we’re at an early stage in a similar cycle. There’s a lot of denial of our COVID reality in the media right now, it’s not something people generally like thinking about, and don’t want to acknowledge it. There are many powerful interests and draws pulling people “back to normal” despite COVID’s far reaching, undeniable damage.As they say, history rhymes.
But the COVID story did start with concern.
In 2020, news outlets would print that we were “all in this together”, politicians said things like this is the “greatest fight of our time”, and the New York Times published a list of the names of the dead on its front page.
But if you look at most news outlets today, COVID hardly registers despite its ongoing impact.
For now, fewer people may be dying when they get COVID, but people are still dying, and importantly: death is not the only bad outcome.
Insidious damage from COVID and the effects of Long COVID are ballooning into a massive population health problem, with devastating individual consequences. We’ve known this for years.
But public health leaders are not really doing much to warn the public and there’s not a lot of information in the news media. Mainstream media certainly isn’t keeping up with the latest studies so it’s surprising when there is a story about it—Rolling Stone recently ran a piece with the headline “Long COVID is Real”, which for regular listeners of this show, is probably not news. But for a lot of people it might be.
When people’s experiences don’t match up with what they’re hearing in the mainstream news, their trust gets shaken.
Sometimes they turn to questionable sources promising “The Truth” and end up believing radically wrong information from radically wrong people who get platformed in different kinds of media that has its own agenda.
(Sometimes they even end up on podcasts, god forbid. Just kidding, not all of them rhyme with Shmo Shrogen.)
Some of those radically wrong people have ended up in government.And that’s even worse for public health.
How did we get here?
Our guests today will help us map some key pivots in the media to where something like masking is now shamed, mocked and criminalized from when it used to be encouraged and presented positively and hopefully help us understand why.
Notably, both of our guests are living with Long COVID themselves.
According to journalist Julia Doubleday, this media switchup from concern to callousness was calculated.
There was a series of distinct media pivots from 2020 to now that produced these night and day narratives.
JULIA: So that was very, very disturbing to see, the entire press just sort of changing the terms of what success looked like and that success looking like throwing millions and millions of people under the bus
DANIELLA: If you look at any major news source there are usually stories that use arbitrary time references like “post-pandemic” or “after COVID” or, my personal favourite, “during COVID”, which… aren’t based on anything but vibes. Maybe wishful thinking or misunderstanding.
Because it's still during COVID. As I am recording this I know many people who have COVID right now.Most people seem to use “during the pandemic” to refer to the time we were collectively trying to prevent spreading it. But we see it so often in the media as a rigid time frame, even about things that have nothing to do with COVID. It reinforces a narrative that COVID is over or transmission has ended. Which is just patently untrue.
6 years is not a long time, pathologically speaking. Especially not in this hyperconnected, hyper-consumerist world of constant travel and VERY few mitigations. HIV has been around since about 40 years ago. Measles has been around since about 1000 years ago. The earliest written records of TB? More than 3,000 years ago. And we think we can “during COVID” this away? Not so fast.
In May 2023 Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, the Director General of the World Health Organization (or WHO) actually said that the worst thing we could do is act like this is over… as he was ending the emergency phase of the pandemic.In February 2024, in the 5th year of the pandemic, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who’s now the Director of Epidemic and Pandemic Management, Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Programme - long title - at the World Health Organization, reminded us that we are still in a pandemic and countries should be acting as such.
But you wouldn’t find much coverage of these reminders on the 6 o’clock news.
I had the opportunity to talk directly to Dr. Van Kerkhove in November 2025 before her keynote presentation at the Global Health Security Conference in that happened in Vancouver. I asked her about the framing that COVID is over, which we so often see in the media:
Dr. Van Kerkhove: I find it really striking, um, that the world wants so desperately to pretend it didn't happen… but it's not over. I think it's fair to say that the crisis is over, but the virus is circulating. It's evolving. Um, it's changing… And because vaccination rates are so low for COVID, um, we still continue to see that burden.When we had our call, her presentation was titled “Rethinking Global Health Security in the Post-COVID Era”
When she spoke to the audience later that day, she said she’d changed it to “Rethinking Global Health Security in the Post-COVID crisis Era”. Interesting.How something is framed in the media often comes down to a few key players, including the newsroom team (journalists and editors), and the owners of media companies.
It’s often said that a journalist’s job is not to balance things equally but to find out what’s true.
If someone says it’s raining, a journalist’s job is not to find an equal number of people who say it’s raining and people who say it’s not raining and tie that all together in some neat package. Neither is their job to repeat press releases from people who have a vested interest in you thinking it’s not raining.
A journalist’s job is to go outside and find out whether it is or is not raining. Anything else is just a false equivalence.
Almost 6 years into a pandemic with a pathogen inflicting mounting damage to us, not many journalists or outlets are doing that. Some are. But they’re few and far between.
Journalists have a responsibility to tell the truth. Even if it’s not easy or comfortable.
As the old adage goes: the job of journalism is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.In addition to the newsroom team, the people who own media companies play a huge role as to whether or not we hear that it is raining. Including social media companies, just look at who owns those and the influence that has on what people see and believe.
To help us understand more, we’ve spoken to Kayli Jamieson. She is a science communicator, researcher, and graduate student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Her work examines how the media has manufactured consent for the pandemic to be “over” even though it's ongoing.
KAYLI: If we look at media ownership and structure and who's funding them– and also interests of the news media to promote themselves to make money– So for example, what's considered newsworthy and the sources that they may be quoting as well can also be taken into consideration. There can still be dissent from journalists, people working within the media organization, but you know, just enough to make it seem like, “oh, the system works” but at the same time it doesn't interfere with the domination of an official agenda.DANIELLA: The term “manufacturing consent” has been around for a while. It was coined by Walt Lippman and written about by Chomsky and Herman, who feature in Kayli’s research. Simplisticly, manufacturing consent means managing public opinion – discouraging the masses from questioning policies or agendas set out to serve a certain interest.
And that’s huge in how the COVID pandemic has played out. The media is one of the main ways public health organizations can get their messaging out to the broader public: through press conferences and interviews with journalists that are broadcast or included in reporting.
Our opinions and behaviour can be strongly influenced by how this is presented. Choices about what to cover and how to cover it are often influenced by powerful people and organizations with their own set of experiences, incentives, and agendas.Malcolm X knew it. We have to ask: who does the dominant narrative serve? Who does the dominant narrative harm? And: does it match people’s real experiences and high quality research?
Media outlets controlled by large established organizations, where most people get their news, are often called “mainstream media”. In Canada, just a small number of very rich companies own most of the news outlets.
When governments and companies have an interest in presenting something a certain way, it’s often reflected in the news that’s most readily available. And increasingly, people are reliant on social media sources controlled by corporate forces.
Here’s an example: Israel’s genocide in Palestine - another public health crisis that will have long shadow. In 2023 it came out that the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, had forbidden journalists from using the word Palestine and agreed to Israeli censorship about food drops in Gaza, while other outlets like CTV, owned by Bell Media, had drastic double standards about its coverage of the genocide. Crucial reporting on this was done by independent outlets the Breach and the Maple. But who stands to benefit from limiting what journalists can say? Well, Canada supports and has political and economic ties to Israel. Despite now recognizing Palestine as a state, Canada still sells arms and arms components to Israel and has been heavily criticized for doing so by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and various grassroots organizations.
A Toronto-based researcher and journalist, Sarah Samuel, writing in Al Jazeera’s Media Review explains: the Canadian mainstream media mirrors government messaging around the genocide in Palestine when it should be the other way around– where the news media should inform the public with history, context, and nuance “that hold[s] the government policy accountable.”
“Should”, of course, doesn’t translate to “will”. Especially for coverage of genocide, pandemics and other things that affect the economy and endless pursuit of profit over people.That’s not to say everything published is always the same narrative. We do still see some pieces published with different perspectives, sometimes in the opinion section sometimes not. Here’s Kayli again:
KAYLI: So yes, you still see some articles that have some pushback against, uh, the quote unquote end of the pandemic. You'll still see some reporting on long COVID,
DANIELLA: According to Kayli the dominant frame would sound like:
KAYLI: This overarching narrative like “oh, it's just we need to move on from it. It's nothing to worry about.”DANIELLA: Ok. We’ve been through how the media operates and motivations for telling and framing the stories they do. Now let’s get into more about what this means specifically for public health.
Public health is often a topic in the media. And it’s not always represented well.
Narratives and images around public health issues for example: HIV, mpox, ebola have all suffered from media choices that have reinforced racist stereotypes and harmful tropes in the past that unfortunately stick around today.
With our guest, Julia Doubleday, we’re going to go through some of the hairpin turns in mainstream outlets’ coverage of COVID, from vaccines to claims about immunity to masking. This is covered in more detail in Julia’s newsletter, The Gauntlet, (which you should read and sign up for by the way!)
She calls this the Boiling Frogs Timeline. Because you know there’s that old myth that if you put a frog in boiling water it’ll jump out, but if you leave it in there while the water’s heating up then it’ll just stay until it dies? Don’t do this - I'm pretty sure it’s just a metaphor at this point - but yeah, the public are the frogs in this case.
JULIA: Early 2021…
DANIELLA: This is a couple months after the vaccines first came out in mid-December 2020
JULIA: There's a lot of misconceptions about what was being said at this time on all sides of the political spectrum
DANIELLA: Then-CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, was on the Rachel Maddow show - an MSNBC show that millions of people watched when this aired in March of 2021 saying things like:
JULIA: if you get vaccinated you will not contract and pass on COVID.
DANIELLA: Maddow introduced Walensky as a scientist “not prone to hyperbole”, who “sticks to the facts and the data”. Walensky said:
WALENSKY: ...we can kind of almost see the end. We're, we're vaccinating so very fast. Our data from the CDC today suggest, um, you know, that, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus. Don't get sick. Um, and, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real world data. Um, and yet on the other side, I'm watching the cases tick up.
JULIA: We should be clear that when she made this claim, she very specifically said she was excited about this new data which showed that people were not contracting COVID after getting vaccinated because this data meant that vaccines alone can get us to the end of the pandemic.
DANIELLA: This is often referred to as a vaccine-only strategy. Julia says that by this, Walensky implied that the vaccines were sterilizing. If they were, that would mean the end of the pandemic. If they weren’t… well… we’d probably end up somewhere where we are now with constant transmission at varying levels.
DANIELLA: Sterilizing vaccines are ones that totally prevent transmission. Had the COVID vaccine been sterilizing, it would make it virtually impossible to pass COVID. Like dousing water on a fire so it can’t spread. Some of those are reportedly still in the works but that’s not what we have.
The vaccines we had then, the same kinds we have now (Note: this refers to mRNA vaccines available in Canada), help to prevent hospitalization and death. They do also help with transmission but clearly, COVID was and is still being transmitted despite large numbers of people getting vaccinated early on. So they don’t prevent COVID.
JULIA: Without sterilizing vaccines what would happen and what did happen is that the virus will continually mutate around vaccine protection and continually hit us with more new strains and continue to reinfect us over and over again.
DANIELLA: It’s hard for vaccine development to keep up with the speed of mutation for a virus that’s pretty much left to run rampant and people are getting sick all the time. That’s what allows it to mutate– constantly getting into and replicating in new hosts. It gives the virus lots of opportunities.
JULIA: I think it's also good to talk about the fact that when they said this, they were not purposely lying because this is something that I feel like people who are very COVID aware sometimes get wrong. You know, they think that Biden and Walensky went on TV and they were purposely lying to people about this.
DANIELLA: Other public health leaders in Canada were also super optimistic about the vaccine, often giving the impression that once people were vaccinated, they would allow everything to go back to normal. In May of 2021 Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer was so optimistic that vaccines would fix this massive public health problem she joked to the media at a press conference:
HENRY: "I've been trying to pitch to the premier that we should have B.C. Hug Day in July — when we get to that point where we're where we can take our masks off and have those closer social interactions that we used to have with people that we're close to whether that's family or friends,"DANIELLA: Canada’s Public Health Officer at the time, Dr. Teresa Tam, had a more vigilant approach, that same May of 2021, and warned people that "It's not absolute", "There's reduction in your risk of transmission, but it doesn't necessarily eliminate your risk of transmission." She did also suggest vaccines would bring us back to how life was before COVID.
JULIA: Their early data from Pfizer and Moderna found that those vaccines were very, very, very effective. They were like over like 95%, uh, effective at halting transmission. Um, the reason that that effectiveness, um, tanked, it's a couple reasons. Um, one is that it turns out that those vaccines have an efficacy waning issue.
DANIELLA: The COVID vaccines we have (note: referring to mRNA vaccines available in Canada) are most effective in the first 3 months after they’re administered and after that they kind of lose power. As an airborne virus, COVID was good at finding those coverage gaps. It spreads between people pretty effectively through simply breathing before symptoms or even without symptoms.
Approximately 40% of transmission happens without symptoms. This is still not well communicated by public health institutions. And it’s still not well understood by the public. Or healthcare workers for that matter. I have heard some fascinating things come out of a few doctors’ mouths.It would do a lot for public health leaders to plainly say: COVID is airborne. It spreads through the air by breathing and talking. Asymptomatic transmission is a key part of how it thrives.
It would also do a lot for the media to share this message widely. Because, as we know, that’s where a lot of people are getting their COVID information. They’re not looking up peer reviewed studies or tracking where data gets posted.
DANIELLA: The second reason–
JULIA: it's such an effective evolutionary opponent, um, that it was able to really, really quickly mutate its way around our vaccine protection. So all this is to say that they were not intentionally lying. Those vaccines were really good vaccines when they first debuted, but the reality is they should have understood the limitations of the data they had. In other words, this was not malicious, but it was incompetent.
DANIELLA: What should public health leaders have said?JULIA: They should have understood that that data they had was too early to make a declaration like that. They should have understood that they were interpreting it highly optimistically.
DANIELLA: It’s ALSO important to note that people were doing a lot of other things in 2021 that mitigated transmission in real world situations: a lot of people were masking with some kind of mask, meeting outdoors, and were more aware of not being in right up in each other’s faces because of social distancing behaviour, which didn’t eliminate airborne transmission but did make it a bit harder for COVID to spread.
JULIA: I think from their perspective of the CDC, they probably felt that telling people these vaccines are really, really good is the best way to get people to get vaccinated. Um, but at the end of the day, they've now given people the impression that these vaccines are sterilizing.And then people got infected with COVID and now there's this crisis of legitimacy with the CDC and with the WHO. There's also a huge reluctance for people to get COVID vaccines.
DANIELLA: Again, what public health institutions say, how they say it, why they say it, due to political pressures, and how the media report on those statements (and their scientific backing) has an undeniable influence on people’s behaviour.
In May 2021 the United States’ CDC no longer required people to wear masks indoors, using the removal of mitigations like masking to incentivize people to get vaccinated. This was loudly repeated in the media, leaving the unfortunate impression that vaccinations were all we needed to stop transmission. Governments seemed keen to remove requirements. People thought, great, if we get vaccinated we don’t have to do any of the other stuff! British Columbia soon followed in July 2021.
JULIA: And all of this goes back to the fact that people don't understand the limits of the COVID vaccines. They don't understand what the COVID vaccines do and don't do. They don't understand the way the COVID virus is mutating around vaccine protection.
So like I've seen people saying like, oh, well if you wear a mask, that means you don't trust the vaccine. Well, no, I mean, you are harming the vaccine by not masking because you're allowing the vaccine, which is supposed to be a last line of defence against the virus, to be a first line of defence against the virus.
DANIELLA: In the SARS episode you heard about the Swiss cheese model – layering protections. Not every protection offers 100% coverage so layering preventative measures like masking, vaccination and air filtration for example would give us much better transmission protection.
Relying on just one layer, let alone one that doesn’t even stop the virus from entering your body, is a pretty illogical thing to use as a first line of defence. But that is what has been presented and repeated by public health and the media.
Vaccines are absolutely one of humanity’s greatest scientific inventions. But they are not the only piece to ending a pandemic. The catchphrase “Vaxxed and relaxed” was everywhere you looked on social media, captioned under selfies of people in tears because of what they had been told and understood the vaccine meant for them: going back to normal.
Here’s Kayli, the grad researcher who studies media narratives and COVID:KAYLI: I specifically titled my thesis about biopolitics of quote unquote immunity because there's a huge misconception about the whole vaxxed and relaxed policy we hear being touted by public health.
Because vaccination was never purposed to prevent transmission. It's a huge misconception, which I do try to address with my informal science communication work, but it promotes that individualist approach to public health by posing vaccination as the end all saviour to ending COVID. But it never did, especially with the hundreds of mutated sub variants we're seeing– there is no immunity. People are getting reinfected even within weeks, uh, of a previous infection.
DANIELLA: “immunity” is another word whose day-to-day usage got muddied in the media. I fished out my old Kuby textbook on immunology (and texted my mom, an immunologist). The relevant definition of immunity, according to the 7th edition is: “long lived protection from [a] specific organism”. Immunity is resistance to getting sick; effectively preventing and defending against pathogen invasion. If we keep getting sick with something, we’re not immune to that thing / if we keep getting sick, we’re not immune.
DANIELLA: Julia Doubleday—
JULIA: What we've entered is now a zone where the virus is consistently interacting with the vaccine, which means that it is going to be able to mutate around this vaccine protection, which is what happened. And we got Delta.DANIELLA: New variants look different enough to the immune system that they’re not recognized well. There’s no long-lived protection to something that keeps changing.
Okay. We’re now in Winter 2021. What did the media do when it became clear that encouraging people to get vaccinated was not producing the promised end to COVID?JULIA: because the press was trying to defend the vaccine-only strategy, they just were saying, oh, well this is just, this is just a rare thing that's just happening. Um, but we were already well on our way– we were well on the road to: now the virus has escaped the vaccine. Once that happened, the vaccine-only strategy was dead.
DANIELLA: The vaccine-only strategy was dead.
Do you recall when the phrase “breakthrough infections” was all over the news? Initially it was framed as rare to get COVID after you’d been vaccinated, maybe as a way to encourage people to continue getting their shots. But as more and more people who had been vaccinated kept getting COVID, in my opinion, this is a key point where public health lost more trust from the public and public health leaders didn’t communicate well or clearly enough to save it.The explanation that had been said more quietly before, that the COVID vaccines were purposed to prevent hospitalization and death, now became the louder thing public health said. And this could have been seen by people as “shifting the goal posts”. Especially the ones who were mostly paying attention to headlines and bought into the overstated excitement that vaccines equalled back to normal. This was a pivotal public health comms failure that helped lead us to the crisis of legitimacy the field faces today.
JULIA: Our best chance to eliminate it would have been in the summer of 2021, because cases actually did get really low. And instead, the administration and everyone did the opposite of what we should have done, which is, “oh, cases are low now let's everybody rip your masks off and do whatever.”We had this strong match between the vaccine and the circulating virus. There was no Delta yet. Um, so if we had been utilizing NPIs…
DANIELLA: NPIs are non-pharmaceutical interventions, like masking and cleaning the air.
JULIA: … and we had engaged the public, and okay, this is, this is actually an elimination project now. Um, it's much easier to eliminate a small amount of virus than a huge, gigantic amount of virus where one in 30 people have it, you know?
DANIELLA: You might recall a section from the SARS episode where the Commission Report that says: “A simple rule of nature was at work. Protections go up, cases go down; protections come down, cases go up.”
And that’s exactly the rollercoaster ride we’re on now, especially in hospitals.
DANIELLA: Then the media changed tack again during the Delta wave. It shifted to blaming people who had not been vaccinated. Remember when we started hearing “pandemic of the unvaccinated” in the summer of 2021?
JULIA: with Delta, they were claiming that nobody that was vaccinated was gonna die. That was the claim. As of like July, 2021, you know, whenever it was, September, October, 2021, it was, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
It's very easy to construct this narrative of, well, you know, it's only people that deserve it. It's only people that didn't get vaccinated. They're the ones that are gonna die. It's not anybody that doesn't, you know, deserve it.
JULIA; a lot of vaccinated people are dying, but there's still not reporting that in the press. So, at, in Omicron Wave one, Joe Biden puts out a statement that is. Really awful, same kind of thing
DANIELLA: Speaking to the the media in December 2021, Joe Biden says,
BIDEN: “For unvaccinated we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if they’re unvaccinated…Omicron is here. It’s gonna start to spread much more rapidly at the beginning of the year…The only real protection is to get your shot”JULIA: and again, you know, this is one of the deadliest waves of the pandemic. It's almost 200,000 people that die in two months, and 40% of them were vaccinated. That number, that percentage does not come out until months later. Um, at the time, every day we're just hearing, oh, well these people, you know, they must be unvaccinated when the Washington Post finally does a little expose about it, they're talking about the older people in the hospital saying, “I just don't understand, you know, I'm vaccinated. I don't understand how this could happen to me because I was told this wasn't possible”, basically.
DANIELLA: So there is some media pushback on the idea that breakthrough infections were rare but here comes another pivot…
JULIA: As it becomes clear that vaccinated people are dying now, it's not just unvaccinated people that are gonna die now it's “Okay… Old people are gonna die and vulnerable people are gonna die and disabled people are gonna die, but you are not gonna die. So like, who cares?”
DANIELLA: Yikes. Actually, former Chief Medical Advisor for the US, Anthony Fauci, famously said:
FAUCI: “even though you’ll find the vulnerable will fall by the wayside, they’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized and some will die, it’s not going to be the tsunami of cases that we’ve seen.”
DANIELLA: And, boy, did the media run with that one. Kayli talked to me about this switch too:KAYLI: Early pandemic, we saw a lot of ageism occurring. For example, oh, COVID doesn't impact children or young, healthy people, but it may impact grandma. So we gotta protect grandma, but you know, some people are gonna die anyway. Like you hear a lot of that occurring which was disturbing. And then obviously the talking points of immunocompromised and vulnerable high risk people that we have to protect and that's why we mask.
But over the course of this pandemic in the last few years, it's almost like that sort of collectivist approach has been forgotten and more pushed for an individualized approach. So: “Yes, okay. Those people who are at high risk, they'll always be there, but they just have to manage this on their own. And they're supposed to become an acceptable cost so the rest of society can move forward.”
DANIELLA: On July 2nd, in British Columbia, a day after removing mask requirements, Bonnie Henry said in a media interview that happened outside:
“...it is our own personal risk behaviours that are important… and that means we need to go back to taking our own personal responsibility for keeping our risk low and protecting others.”DANIELLA: There will definitely be a whole episode about public health institutions hiding behind “personal responsibility” and offloading their responsibility and collective responsibility entirely to individuals. Those ideas that it’s fine for “the disabled”, “the weak”, “the old” to die (otherwise known as eugenics, though, it’s never called that in practice) actually underpinned a lot of decisions from public health leaders around the world. For now, I’ll say that the media still seems to have no problem at all with reproducing those eugenicist ideas, which were also popular with one Adolf Hitler, not too long after the 1918 flu pandemic.
DANIELLA: What about everyone’s favourite thing to say about COVID now: it’s just a cold, it’s mild.
I’m sure you still hear that a lot in the media.
That was calculated.
The Kentucky Health Department said as much at the NACCHO public health conference in 2024 – from their presentation description: ‘...by blending COVID in with the annual sneezing and wheezing season, we were able to calm fears,’ they said ‘…and keep the haters at bay…’”
Their presentation was full of media clips illustrating their success. Virtually all public health institutions pivoted to a version of this manufactured confluence.
If you live in British Columbia the word “mild” probably plays in your head in Bonnie Henry’s voice, she said it so much at press conferences. But people are still dying and people are still getting Long COVID. And isn’t it kind of Orwellian to have SARS-CoV-2, a virus with the word “severe” right in its name, so mercilessly called “mild”? Don’t worry, it’s just MILD Severeacutrespiratorysyndrome.
If that’s not doublethink, I don’t know what is.(warped, slowed down, creepy)>
JULIA: they really, really worked hard to brand. Omicron as “mild”, which I think is also why they have never named another variant after Omicron. 'cause I think so much money, time and energy went into branding omicron as mild, so they would have to do that again with another variant.DANIELLA: To be clear, Julia’s not saying the WHO itself directly branded Omicron as mild but that the dominant narrative at the time, influenced by big business, advertisers, and airlines was pushing very hard for a return to normal and their “money machine”, as writer William Rivers Pitt, put it.
If people thought omicron was mild, well, that wouldn’t be bad for those interests. And if the WHO didn’t officially name another one that would also not be bad for those interests. The WHO only names what it decides are Variants of Concern though there have been lots of unofficial names for different variants like “Kraken” and “Nimbus”.
Even though many public health leaders and the media repeated that omicron was mild, the British Medical journal quite plainly said no, it’s not.Dr Peter Jüni, the head of the Ontario Science Advisory Committee said in December 2021 in a CBC news interview, shaking his head in his hands, “I’m about to lose it”, calling it mild or less virulent was “clutching at straws” and in January 2022 the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus said:
GHEBREYESUS: “Omicron may be less severe, on average of course. But the narrative that omicron is mild is misleading, hurts the overall response, and costs more lives.”
DANIELLA: Many political leaders and governments had bet on vaccines being the answer, calling it “the best way to protect yourself”, often dismissing or underplaying or avoiding the critical power of other protections like respirators, ventilation and cleaning the air. If they were mentioned it usually came across as a decorative afterthought. Or non-vaccine interventions were suggested and not explained so the public didn’t necessarily understand why. If you’d like to learn more about this – listen to Episode 3, Something’s in the Air.Now, politicians who run governments are concerned with staying elected. That’s how they get paid. They had told us all that the COVID vaccine would help get us back to normal because they felt people didn’t want to wear masks anymore and just wanted to stop thinking about COVID. Some people were very loud about this.
Politicians have pressures to make decisions that benefit the economy. So they found themselves in a predicament. If they went back on their promises that vaccines would end the COVID problem, then the public would be upset and they’d maybe lose their jobs. So how could they keep their jobs and frame a failing COVID strategy as a success? Through the media and public health of course.JULIA: The New York Times and other outlets behind them started just straight up lying to the public that the strategy had succeeded. It failed on its own terms. Dr. Fauci in the fall, after the Delta Wave had said that we could talk about going back to normal and stopping other measures like masks when we had under 10,000 cases a day. And during these big winter waves we've been having, we have well over a million cases a day. So again, it failed on its own terms. It failed on the terms of the Biden administration. But the New York Times and these other outlets started to lie about what success would look like.
DANIELLA: Politicians “took the win” that most people had gotten vaccinated, leaned into minimizing COVID’s effects using the circular logic that people would think COVID is over when leaders didn’t respond to it any differently than a cold. If you’re keeping track – another goalpost shift. Then politicians wouldn’t really have to deal with the problem in order to stay in office. All they needed to do was make people feel more normal. Even at the cost of deprioritizing COVID protections and putting the long term health of the public – including kids – at risk.
The CEO of Delta airlines was so bold as to directly write to Dr. Rochelle Walensky at the CDC, pressuring the organization to shorten isolation guidelines. Which they then did.
Governments encouraged people to work and spend money, for instance: and I can’t believe this was in 2020 but the Eat out to Help out campaign in the UK, encouraged people back to indoor dining. Biden was explicit about wanting to see people enjoying helping the economy recover. In Ontario, the government poured millions into kickstarting festivals and events through the Reconnect program. People could go back to their regular lives, and everything would be hunky dory if we ignored the elephant in the corner!
The media was in a similar situation. They started to move the goalposts again. We saw it in Canada and other parts of the world. This framing shift to when people would get COVID, normalizing COVID infections that we’re just all gonna get it, it’s inevitable but it’s just like a cold. Maybe.Framing this novel virus with (what should be) sobering health outcomes as “just having the sniffles”… in other contexts we might call it gaslighting.
JULIA: ”oh, well, yes, of course you're gonna get infected.” And not only, of course you're gonna get infected, “of course you're gonna get infected every year, every six months. Some of you might get infected twice a year. Some of you might get infected three times a year. Some of you might get disabled by your infection. Some of your children, your 12-year-old children, your 10-year-old children, your six-month-old children might get disabled and disabled long term. That's fine. And that's part of the victory that we sold to you. That's actually what we said would happen,” which isn't true.DANIELLA: If you’ve watched Shrek, remember when Lord Farquaad says, “some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make”?
That essentially became public health policy. I thought it would be harder to get people to go along with that. I guess not.JULIA: I would love now to shout out one of my worst enemies, Dave Leonhart at the New York Times.
DANIELLA: He used to write the highly influential newsletter The Morning, which reached more than 5 million daily readers in 2021. In addition to a list of early ‘omicron is mild’ commentary in November 2021, the next year in January 2022, its headline was “Omicron is milder” and pushed the idea of individual risk. According to Julia his newsletter amplified the ‘omicron is mild’ misinformation.
JULIA: Uh, it came from a single early study in South Africa, which did not adjust for a bunch of different factors, including vaccination. It did not adjust for vaccination.DANIELLA: That means it didn’t remove the influence of vaccines on the outcome in their study. That study is now published in the Lancet and does outline that one of its major limitations is that they didn’t have access to vaccination data for people who were not hospitalized.
JULIA: Omicron was more mild than Delta, but Delta was itself more severe than the original strain. So Omicron is no more mild than the original strain of COVID.
DANIELLA: There are different approaches to measuring severity but one analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine, pointing out the tempering impact of widespread vaccination when omicron emerged inferred from available information that: “omicron, alpha, and wild-type SARS-CoV-2 have similar intrinsic severity.”
Many news outlets did try to temper the misunderstanding that omicron was mild but that horse had left the stable.JULIA: And I think this is one of those pieces of misinformation that is just sort of in people's heads now.
DANIELLA: The British Medical Journal quoted Emma Thomson, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Glasgow, saying: “delta was more severe than alpha. Omicron has taken a dive in severity, but we know that it doesn’t take much for the virus to change.”
JULIA: It was never true. It was based on one small study. It was repeated so many times. And one of the things I always think about is when people take their new babies, their new ass babies out into public, like this is the same virus that you as an adult hid in your house from for a year, and now you're taking your new baby out that is not vaccinated like. Don't do that. Like, do not do that. It is still neuroinvasive. It is still a vascular virus that will damage your blood vessels. It will damage your immune system. It will damage your baby.
DANIELLA: And confusingly, even though COVID was now supposedly “mild”, we then see the false idea of “immunity debt” popping up in news reports. That’s the misinformed thinking that because of protections like masking and isolation that now children’s immune systems were “out of practice”.
No. We do not have to get sick for our immune systems to work. We didn’t have a term “immunity debt” until before some French researchers coined it about COVID in 2021.JULIA: unsurprisingly we're seeing at least a big summer wave and a big winter wave every year. Uh, but then we're also seeing big like RSV waves, big waves of other infectious diseases, and a decision was made to start mainstreaming anti-vaxxer ideas.
DANIELLA: Instead of questioning and investigating whether COVID had perhaps affected our immune systems (As the New York Times itself had actually printed a piece about in November of 2020.) Nope, we went down the nonsense path.
JULIA: This is very, very disturbing. In order to protect the vaccine-only response to COVID, the mainstream media makes a decision to mainstream anti-vaxxer ideas, uh, that are completely anti-science. One of those ideas is the idea that masks can hurt your immune system. … if you go back to 2020, you'll find all of these same outlets publishing debunking articles of this idea. So in 2020 you had MAGA people saying, well, I'm not gonna wear a mask because that that's gonna hurt my immune system, and then when I take it off, I'm gonna instantly get sick. And these, these outlets, like the New York Times published articles that said, no, that's not true.
That's absurd. That's not how the immune system works. Um, but come 2022, 2023 in order to defend to parents the fact that their children are now extremely sick because the New York Times has sold them a new normal where their kids are gonna be sick all the time. They start to propagandize the MAGA/anti-vaxxer talking points, like this idea that masks made their kids sick.
They say this exact, this exact same talking point, they sell this back to the public. Well, because your kids wore masks. That's why they're sick now. It's because as soon as they took that mask off, their immune system was just so weak from wearing that mask. That is not true. It's been been debunked so many times
DANIELLA: Without public health institutions stepping in to clearly communicate science information, many news outlets contributed to the spread of this misinformation. Offering pretty meaningless questions like “should we panic”? And appearing to frame things with the main goal of pacifying people. This has been going on since the beginning of the pandemic.
Next we get the hygiene hypothesis being widely misunderstood and misappropriatedJULIA: the hypothesis says is that your kid needs to play in the dirt so that they can interact with good microbes and bacteria, but that has nothing to do with pathogenic viruses. So even, even the hygiene hypothesis is controversial. Like it's not a proven theory that your kid needs to eat dirt.
There's no truth – literally zero, zilch, zippo– to the idea that your kid needs to get viruses. If that were true, then guess what? In all of human history, all those kids that were growing up, we know what happens when kids get exposed to tons of viruses. They don't have amazing immune systems. They die when they're five years old. You can look through all of human history, you can look around the world. Kids who are exposed to tons of viruses don't have amazing immune systems. They just die young. That's what happens to 'em. Um, but the mainstream media shamefully chooses to start mainstreaming a bunch of right wing bullshit, literally, just so that parents won't freak out that their kids are now very clearly very ill.
DANIELLA: The media and journalists are proud of their role of informing the public and generally hold themselves to a high standard of telling the truth. They’re sensitive to being wrong or needing to correct claims. Doing that too often undermines their credibility in the eye of the public.
But poor reporting on COVID because of government and public health misinformation on top of many journalists themselves struggling to interrogate their own reporting with a critical eye… we’ve ended up in a media quagmire that often obstructs good reporting on COVID and public health. Some journalists do, but not many. And when the CBC did publish an article about airborne transmission in 2021, a well-known scientist who has been slow to accept airborne transmission made a whole scene, complained about character assassination and the CBC ombudsperson had to get involved in a drawn out complaint process. You see what I mean about forces of influence? That’s not a topic an outlet would really want to touch much after that. Despite it very much being in the public interest.
The cognitive dissonance spreading out in all directions makes a mess that is hard to clean up. Desperately suggesting any answer but COVID’s effects or printing stories about medical experts being baffled by things that research has also associated with of COVID… maybe that’s easier to do in the short term than confront the tangled web.
JULIA: I will say, I feel like parents are starting to be like, wait, is this weird because we're, we're obviously well past, we're well past the point when most kids were wearing masks or taking off masks. Chronic absences have doubled. They're still incredibly sick. More studies have come out demonstrating, you know, that kids who had COVID were more likely to get RSV. More studies have come out demonstrating negative impacts on the immune system from COVID. More parents are starting to get angry that their kids are sick all the time.
So I am starting to see more pushback. I think that initially it was really easy for parents to buy into this immunity debt theory because people wanted it to be true. Like, unfortunately, it's just easy to sell people on something when one theory requires them to do nothing and requires them to not face reality, which is really unpleasant.
DANIELLA: Media, what it reports on and how, again, influences people’s behaviour.
On CBS’ 60 minutes in September 2022, at a car trade show, Joe Biden said to the reporter that the pandemic was over (which one country can’t decide alone). He trotted out some circular logic again – since nobody was wearing masks, COVID must be over.
He visually and verbally gave permission from the highest post in the world that everyone could stop masking and, implicitly, stop caring about getting other people sick. The masks dropped. Literally and figuratively.
And right along with them went any sense of collective responsibility.
JULIA: In early 2022, there's a point when the framing around people who want to protect others changes from these are people who are pro-social and they want to protect people in their communities to, these are people who are weak and cowards and they're scared babies.
I quote it in my article, um, in the Dave Leonhardt newsletter in January, 2022, where, you know, keep in mind that this is a point where so many Americans are dying of COVID at this point. Almost half of them are vaccinated. It's about a 9/11 worth of people every day are dying of COVID. And he says that there's no right answer about whether COVID is dangerous, that everybody has their own personal risk tolerance.
And you just, you know, you just have to decide what you're comfortable with. And this is the point where people who were good liberals, who were like shaming people, you know, for not caring about grandma completely switch sides
DANIELLA: This happened to many people I know. People who were so outraged by the anti-public health, anti-mask trucker convoy in Ottawa that they were hand-making and hand-delivering masks in 2020 were, just months later, saying some of the same things as the flag-waving right-wing.
JULIA: They switched sides essentially to just, you are a coward if you want to avoid COVID and acted like this was this completely new idea that they came up with. That like, you know, that this is all about just risk tolerance. Um, but this is the same thing that MAGA had been saying for two years, that like, well, I'm not gonna stay in my house because you are scared.
This is the exact same logic and framing people who say, “uh, I think we should have public health” as “scared” is a political choice. You know, you would never frame someone saying, “I think we should have clean water” as “scared” of dirty water. Or if you did, you would understand that that's a political choice.
DANIELLA: And now we’re in a situation where mask bans have been discussed or even passed, where pieces are published in the media not just mocking people who mask but trying to connect mask-wearing to criminality. That’s dangerous.
JULIA: There's no pushback. There's no pushback. Where are our allies? Where are the people who are angry about this? The fact that, you know, you have these organizations that are supposed to be allied with marginalized groups, and they don't even require masks at their own meetings. We can't even be in the room with these organizations,
JULIA: You are not resisting fascism if you're not making your spaces accessible to disabled people during a pandemic.
DANIELLA: Run that back
JULIA: You are not resisting fascism if you're not making your spaces accessible to disabled people during a pandemic.DANIELLA: One more time just in case
JULIA: You are not resisting fascism if you're not making your spaces accessible to disabled people during a pandemic.JULIA: I think another thing that, that should be mentioned about this really, really successful breaking of solidarity between, uh, groups that were, that are not, do not feel threatened by COVID versus groups that are aware that they're threatened by COVID, is that, you know, one, of course, I think we say it a lot, but of course everyone is at risk for long COVID.
This propaganda campaign to frame COVID as mild and also to make people believe that the person that is threatened by COVID is an “other”, has been so successful that even people who are very explicitly in high risk groups and very explicitly in multiple high risk groups do not conceive of themselves as being high risk.
So you will see people who are over the age of 60, who have multiple disabilities, who have multiple illnesses, who are like, “oh no, you know, I don't need to wear a mask”. Um, this is just not a function of the reality of COVID. This is a function of propaganda. It's a function of this feeling that the bad impacts of COVID must and will happen to other people.
DANIELLA: One thing I’ve been struggling to wrap my mind around is why journalists seem so reluctant to report on COVID and its impacts accurately. Isn’t their whole job to find out information? I saw a pretty well-known Canadian journalist tweet a while back, the question “Why does everyone have walking pneumonia?” It was kind of concerning.
DANIELLA: Kayli Jamieson again –
KAYLI: I find that concerning too, when some journalists don't seem to connect the dots. Like I've seen articles speak about the concerning rise in cardiovascular issues or heart attacks rising in young people and people in the COVID conscious Twitter community would point out like, well, yes, what's, what's the other factor for why this is increasing? Why aren't you mentioning the C-word?
DANIELLA: There are some very clear dots to connect for those paying attention. Julia’s take on journalists (who are part of the public) and the public in general:
JULIA: I think on a, on a deep level, there is a personal resistance because I think that people do not want to change, they do not want to visit the reality that they are going to have to make changes in their lifestyle.
And unfortunately, if you acknowledge that COVID is this major ongoing problem, all of a sudden you're now going to have to think through every single decision that you're making in your life every single day.
DANIELLA: It would become about more than reporting a story. You’d have to challenge the things you personally believe (or want to believe) about COVID. You’d have to take on a bunch of labour that you don’t really want to take on to square that circle. And many people, including journalists, are just not ready or willing to do it because the cognitive dissonance is so extreme.
There’s a pro wrestling term (and awesome 2005 album by Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon) called “breaking kayfabe” – breaking character, ending the illusion... and that would crack the facade of “back to normal”.
JULIA: Are you working in person? Are you gonna be the only person in your office that's masking? Aren't people gonna think that's weird? What about your kids? Are your kids going to school? I mean, if you acknowledge that COVID is a neuro-invasive, brain damaging virus, how many times have you let your kids get this virus?
Isn't it easier to just say, well, no, I think, I think the people who say that are crazy, I don't think that's true. What about everybody around you? I mean, are your parents masking or your neighbors masking, or your friends masking? If none of them are doing that, do you wanna be the one person that is now charged with having to constantly be an advocate and an activist who's constantly educating everyone around you?
I think that's also the reason that people won't talk about Long COVID because if you talk about Long COVID, and if you say, “Okay, I believe you, I believe that you got disabled from COVID”, then the next logical step is to say, “Okay, so you believe me. You think that I got this virus, I got disabled. Then why are you spreading it around? Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?”
So the only, the only way people can justify their decision to treat COVID as this very casual thing that they're not gonna worry about giving it to people is to become Long COVID deniers. And that is bleeding into all of these organizations that say that they're, you know, inclusive and they care about diversity and they care about disability. They literally will not acknowledge it. And it is so disgusting. It's so, I mean, it's so revealing. Like I know that eventually they will have to acknowledge Long COVID. I know that things will eventually have to change because I can read a f*cking chart. I can see the disability numbers, I can understand that what's gonna happen in the next five to 10 years. They will eventually have to face reality.
But I will remember.
DANIELLA: Denial of the reality in front of us is pervasive. Kayli sees in her work and personal life as well.
KAYLI: What I'm witnessing– even research aside– from friends and acquaintances is a sort of passive or even active nihilism that yes, this is going to occur, but I need to just like live my life in the way I want to.
And if something succumbs to myself, then oh, well I took on that individualized risk. But they're not understanding is that their individual risk is not individual whatsoever. It's still impacting people that they're taking transit with or sitting in classes with. And these acquaintances and friends are maskless and they don't consider the asymptomatic transmission risk they could be imposing. They don't consider they could be giving someone else long COVID or contributing to someone else's death.
DANIELLA: In another life I am a photographer and a strategist and one thing we haven’t talked about much is the imagery that goes along with these media stories on COVID. I think the photo or video choices made alongside so much COVID coverage has been fascinating.Often news outlets will choose images of surgical masks instead of N95s (which are the kind of masks actually designed the protect against airborne disease transmission), there are sometimes images of screaming children getting vaccinated which elicits a deep response in many people that hurting children is wrong and bad and so associating that emotion with vaccination is certainly a choice.
There are often images of people incorrectly wearing masks. As recently as 2024, the CDC shared an image about Long COVID on social media where only the patient had a mask on, incorrectly labelled as an N95 mask, in an ad where it looked upside down and photoshopped… it all serves to reinforce certain values and ideas.
And whether or not it’s intentional, images are powerful.
Recently there was a Toronto Sun article opposing respirator recommendations in hospitals and the newspaper chose to use a Black person in an N95. As a Black person in Canada I can tell you there are LAYERS to dissect there: Who is considered “other”? What compounding anti-immigrant and anti-Black logic underpins Canada as a settler state? We know Black communities have been hit disproportionately hard by the impacts of COVID. Capital B news has been an outlet that’s actually done really good coverage about this, I think.
What interests does it serve to visually connect Blackness and masking in a piece against masking, even if the authors and editors aren’t explicitly making those connections in the writing?It all makes me think of thatposter again.
I no longer have the physical copy of the poster but I still found myself returning to it again over the years. Through organizing with Black Lives Matter, through my grad research which involved people living with HIV and sex workers, to COVID and the mess public health leaders made…Malcolm X’s words helped frame so many of these experiences because they were right time and again.
Media shapes what is considered truth. And when that truth is filtered through political and economic agendas, that can have real consequences on people’s real lives. Who lives, who suffers, who dies, who is heard and who is ignored.
Kayli’s research talks about this too.Anyway, this episode is not me saying “the mainstream media is always lying”.
But it is true that taking large media outlets at face value could very well leave you with an obscured view, especially when marginalized groups are involved or when it does not serve people with a lot of money and power for most of us to have a clear picture of an issue. Media literacy is so important. And it’s getting more important.
So if you sent me the Malcolm X poster and you’re listening, who are you, mystery person?
Why did you send it? Do you know I still think about it all these years later?DANIELLA: Like I said at the top of the episode, both of our guests today are actually living with Long COVID.
What has all this erroneous media coverage and lack of consistency in public health information looked like to them personally?
JULIA: I was so, um, prepared to get long COVID because I had learned so much about it and I had really COVID proofed my life and like, you know, my friends I had, I had already like gotten to the point where I had prioritized COVID safety and I had weeded out my friends who wouldn't do COVID safety, and beforehand I was like, I'm, I might as well do all of this before I have long COVID.We've put ourselves in the unenviable position of having a public that is completely confused, um, about. I would say they're confused about what viruses even are because half of them think that viruses make your immune system better.
Um, and we did this purposely, you know, we, our watchdog media purposely told parents that viruses will make their kids stronger, which is an anti-vaxxer talking point. And then they have the gall to turn around and say, “oh, why is anti-vax, why are anti-vaxxers, uh, winning? Why is that on the rise?”
You just spent years telling parents that their kids' immune systems will get stronger from infections!Daniella: Kayli said--
KAYLI: I think I represent myself as a cliche example of the young healthy person that got long COVID despite, you know, doing everything right, getting vaccinated, being active, no pre-existing conditions. So I hope to represent that for other people that like you're only one infection away from also becoming disabled and everyone is at risk for that.
I'm very vocal on my Instagram as well about the intersections of academia with how they should care about COVID because universities value the brains of the researchers so much. Like we're the ones that are churning out research outputs for them, trying to get grants, uh, published constantly. So it's very counterintuitive I thought that they're not recognizing the damage that COVID can induce upon our brain.
KAYLI: this whole back to normal mindset or approach is very focused on the economy, those who are actually watching closely, um, will note that COVID is still having an ongoing impact on the economy. For example, like the trillions of dollars of losses being incurred as a result of people becoming disabled from long COVID and being forced to leave the workforce. That has a big impact on the business world. So business and corporations need to still have a vested interest in watching and analyzing COVID.
And we've seen that with insurance companies as well, like denying life insurance to those that develop long COVID. So it does not surprise me whatsoever that Forbes and Bloomberg are making these reports. Um, of course it's coming from like a very neoliberal interest. Um, but it is certainly better than nothing.
I find it tragic how they're pointing this out and public health won't.
JULIA: … I do think public health is dead. It's sort of just like reached a point where it can't, it can't do anything. It has compromised its legitimacy by appealing to the least common denominator. It has no power, it doesn't seem to want power and I think that what we're gonna probably see under Trump is a bird flu pandemic that we have no ability to respond to.
DANIELLA:
Sometimes people say “Well if COVID is still a problem why’s it not on the news?”. Maybe after listening to this episode you might understand why.
We’re at a point in the media-public health-government interaction cycle that truthfully really sucks for anyone who has been paying attention. It’s pretty plain to see COVID is not over, people are having more unexpected and unusual health issues that are often framed as mysterious or surprising… which, if we had good public health and media communication, might be less mysterious if the public understood the kinds of damage repeat COVID infections are doing on a population level. Like Kayli said… there are lots of dots to connect if only we would acknowledge them.
Ignoring something and hoping it goes away is not how good public health outcomes happen.But honest and truthful media communication can be a lifeline.
After a lot of work the smoking narrative was changed.
The climate narrative is changing.
Maybe the COVID narrative can change, too.
There are some outlets and journalists already doing good work who remain grounded in public health reality - The Sick Times does great work keeping a close eye on Long COVID and related conditions , some other independent outlets have continued to publish pieces on public health outside the mainstream narrative, I’m thinking of the work of Michelle Gamage at the Tyee in British Columbia, Julia Doubleday’s The Gauntlet newsletter, of course, Julia Metraux’s disability reporting at Mother Jones, and like I said, Capital B news in the United States publishes on disproportionate COVID impacts on Black folks and I’ve often seen them represent quality masks in their images.So things are out there. I’ll link a bunch on the episode webpage.
And the New York Times—the subject of much of the ire in this episode—right before Hallowee’en 2025 published a piece featuring our very first guest on Public Health is Dead, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly.The piece? “COVID and Flu can triple your risk of heart attack”, clearly telling readers that infections are generally not benign, that COVID damages blood vessels, causes clots, pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks, and strokes. And even though they did the thing conflating COVID and influenza, it also makes the point that influenza isn’t harmless either. They stuck to a vaccine-only prevention approach and didn’t mention masking or cleaning the air.
But I wonder if the population health damage is becoming too hard to ignore.
Perhaps the media shift has started.But there’s still a long way to go.
I went online to find the mystery poster again to see if I could order a copy from the artist.
It was part of a fundraiser for Ferguson protestors and not available anymore but I did find some images of it floating around the internet.
Looking at it this time, I noticed something especially hopeful to me now in the original image that I hadn’t registered when it landed on my desk all those years ago—one of the 3 protesters is wearing an N95 respirator.
CREDITS
Public Health is Dead is created, hosted, written, edited and produced by me, Daniella Barreto
Music, Sound Design and Mixing by Alexandria Maillot
Fact checking and production support from Anika Sharma and Roanne G
Script editing by Lauren M and Kevin Ball
You can see the poster this episode is built around on the show website. The artist, Corina Dross, even sent me a digital file to print and hang up again after I emailed about it!You can find Kayli on Instagram @/wandering and you can find Julia at The Gauntlet, thegauntlet.news.
Thank you for listening!
If you’d like to learn more about the show you can find us at www.publichealthisdead.com.
And exciting news, listeners: We recently won three awards for our work: We took home gold at the 2025 Signal Awards for Best Education Podcast, and silver for Best Science Podcast. We also took home gold at the W3 awards in the Science and Technology Section. This wouldn’t have been possible without listener support so thank you for helping us add some award-backing to our show content. If you would like to chip in for more of Public Health is Dead you can do that on the website.[PROMO for: Public Health Insight Podcast]
This episode is in memory of Leslie Lee III and Alice Wong — fierce public health and disability justice advocates. Leslie was living with Long COVID. They both encouraged me to keep making this podcast. May we all keep working towards the world they were fighting for.