This year’s Tanner Forum on Social Ethics speaker is Ed Yong, who will be giving a virtual livestream presentation followed by a Q&A on Oct. 13, 7-8:30 p.m. For more information about the event, click here.
Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic and is based in Washington, DC. His work has featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired and more. He has won a variety of awards, including the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award. I Contain Multitudes, his first book, became a New York Times bestseller and inspired an online film series, an anthology of plays and a clue on Jeopardy. He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him.
Mr. Yong graciously granted the college an advance interview, which is presented in its entirety below. The Q&A spans a variety of topics and is the perfect primer ahead of his appearance.
Funded in part by the O.C. Tanner Company, the Tanner Forum on Social Ethics brings nationally and internationally recognized speakers to Salt Lake Community College. The forum enhances the college’s mission as a community-based learning institution that provides opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the wider community to come together for the thoughtful examination of critical issues in contemporary social ethics.
Salt Lake Community College would like to pay special recognition to the late Barbara Lindquist Tanner, who passed away in April. Barbara was a huge supporter of the college and the Tanner Forum. Her three honorary doctorates include one from SLCC. She was also named the United Way Woman of the Year. Widely known for their philanthropy, she and her husband of 78 years, Norman Clark Tanner, were also passionate about politics, the arts, education and social justice. The entire SLCC community will miss Barbara and is forever grateful for her many contributions to the college.
For an idea of what Ed Yong will be speaking about Oct. 13, his team had this to say:
"In a matter of months, a new coronavirus has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin, and careening between inaction and ineptitude. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a generation-defining challenge that has left past vulnerabilities exposed and future possibilities unclear. Ed Yong will talk about the unique challenges of reporting on this omni-crisis, how it came to this, and where America goes from here."
Following is the Aug. 25, 2020 interview with Ed Yong.
Q: As of August 25, COVID-19 infections and deaths in America are still high and Spain is beginning to show similar trends. Why is it so difficult for certain leaders and the people they’re leading to understand the importance of cause and effect?
A: I think the pandemic poses several difficult challenges, one of which is the long time lag between cause and effect. So, if you put policies in place that allow for or encourage people to make risky behavioral choices, it will take a while before those choices lead to infections, which will then take longer for those infections to become symptoms, the symptoms to lead to hospitalizations and for all of that to manifest at enough of a level that it becomes obvious in national level statistics. So, there is this difficult time lag between bad decisions and their inevitable consequences. That makes it hard for people to act accordingly. I think people are traditionally stuck in a very reactive mode, and, if you do that with this virus, by the time you react it’s already too late.
Q: In your July 7 article for The Atlantic you quote several public health experts who talk about being ignored by political decision makers or taking a back seat to economic interests at the expense of human lives. How did we get to that point, and how do we change that?
A: It is an unfortunate but all too predictable consequence of several trends that have been mounting and colliding with each other certainly over the last four years but also much longer than that, the devaluation of expertise, the reduction in trust in experts, the rise of communication channels that promote misinformation faster than information. All of these patterns are accommodated in this atmosphere where misinformation cascades regularly, where even the simplest of safety measures like keeping a distance from each other or wearing a mask becomes intensely politicized. And, of course, part of that blame must fall on the federal government, the Trump Administration and (President) Donald Trump in particular. He is certainly a comorbidity in this pandemic in that he repeatedly spreads lies and misinformation about the crisis. He repeatedly downplays the extent of the problem and focuses on distractions and unhelpful solutions rather than doing the things that will actually help make America safe. Donald Trump is, of course, not the only problem here. He is as much a symptom of all the other things we have already talked about, the problems that led to this sort of swirling mass of misinformation.
Q: How much has doubting the science behind climate change paved the way for the success of misinformation campaigns related to the science of the pandemic?
A: I think it’s related. In my head the model isn’t that climate change denialism led to pandemic denialism. I think they both stem from the same underlying problems we talked about before. What makes the pandemic different is its pace. Things are moving much more quickly with the pandemic than they have been with climate change. Both problems are certainly planetary in their scope. Their consequences are very severe. You can think of the pandemic as a very fast-moving version of climate change. What happens there is that you have a huge, what sociologists call, a vortex of fear of uncertainty where people don’t know a lot read that this is a new virus. They have a lot of uncertainty. Their lives have been uprooted. As a result of those two things, they keep searching for new information, but there isn’t that much new sound information to offer. So, you keep on looking for more and there’s not more to be had. That gap can be very easily filled by misinformation, by conspiracy theories and by a president who is trying to deflect blame for his political failings.
Q: What challenges do you face in covering this pandemic without bias?
A: I don’t subscribe to the view of journalism as being about this sort of veneer of neutrality. I think journalism is about being honest and about being fair. To be honest, to tell people the truth, one has to reconcile with the fact that the political parties in charge of this country at the moment and the president who should have led Americans’ response to the pandemic have failed catastrophically. You cannot get around that. You can’t say, ‘Every side is to blame. Every side is telling the truth.’ Clearly, that is not the case. So, my job is to tell people what is happening. And if that slants to one side or another, then so be it. To be clear, I have no political allegiance here. I am not American. I don’t belong to any one party. I don’t even vote in your election. You cannot talk about the pandemic without dealing with politics. It is so central to how the country has failed to control this virus. My main allegiance is to the truth.
Q: There have been reports (based on research from the University of Liverpool) that suggest female leaders around the world are making better decisions than their male counterparts regarding the pandemic. Why is that?
A: I’ve heard that argument, too. There is Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. Angela Merkel in Germany. There are a few other examples. I would caution against putting too much emphasis on any one factor. That’s almost never the thing that makes or breaks a country’s response. There are so many things that go into deciding whether a country did well or not. I think people throughout the pandemic have wrongly focused on a specific thing. Masks, for example. It’s all part of the problem. There needs to be a lot of different solutions in play. In the countries that have done well, it’s not that they have one thing they all do right – they all did many things right, and they did enough things right. The way to look at the importance of female leadership isn’t to say, ‘Women are magical beings whose mere presence makes the country strong.’ It’s more about a country that elects female leaders has certain characteristics that also make it strong in a crisis like this. Think of the presence of a woman in the highest position of power in a country as sort of a sense of other sociological and cultural traits that are also beneficial in a time like this.
Q: What storyline is emerging as the most significant throughout all of this? Is it the socioeconomic inequities? Is it the science behind the speeding up of research and development to produce a vaccine? Is it politics and leadership associated with successes and failures?
A: I think it’s all of the above. If you think about what’s grabbing people and keeping their attention, some of the hot topics at the moment are vaccinations and what will happen when a vaccine is eventually developed, what should schools and colleges be doing. These are very much in the zeitgeist. But I would argue that what we actually need to be paying attention to is all of it. I have argued in my cover story for The Atlantic that so much of what went wrong in the pandemic in America has been both predictable and preventable. This is not just a failure of Trump and the political establishment, but also of our social media environment, the way we ventilate our buildings, America’s healthcare system, it’s neglect of public health, it’s nursing homes infrastructure and absolutely the inequities due to the longstanding legacy of racism and colonialism. All of these things come together to weaken the country and make it vulnerable to a pandemic. Unless we can grapple with the fullness of those problems and think about all of them in conjunction with each other, rather than just skipping from one hot-button topic of the day to the next, I think we’ll continue to lose. And I think we’ll continue to lose against future battles with infectious diseases. You need to look at the full problem square in the face and work out how to deal with everything.
Q: Is mainstream media starting to pick up on the term “long-haulers” (people who experience serious symptoms for weeks or months), which you have written about twice?
A: There’s definitely some momentum. I’ve seen it in the Wall Street Journal, in the New York Times and the Washington Post. I have seen coverage – I think it could stand to have more coverage because clearly there is a very large volume of people who are very badly affected, and they have fallen out of the main narrative. There are several reasons why that is. The first is that our narrative on the pandemic congealed in the early months about how most people only get a mild illness and are fine and only a few people get very sick and possibly die. But there is this in-between stage where people get very sick, don’t get hospitalized but suffer for months and months at home. That just wasn’t part of the way we conceptualized the virus. That meant doctors ignored these patients and trivialized them, journalists didn’t write about them, and that is starting to change. It’s a lesson in how our early narratives can really have significant damaging consequences. A lot of these patients are women and have subjective symptoms like fatigue, pain, things that are difficult to measure. Society in general and the medical establishment and the media have had a terrible track record of taking women’s pain seriously. It ignores and trivializes them. It’s a problem with the pandemic that is both predictable and preventable.
Q: How do we change the culture of the way many people consume their news, which is to say they only get their news through social media or clearly biased news outlets? How do we get people to be smarter about how they consume news and therefore be able to make better decisions?
A: I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I think that it’s a problem. Fox News has been at the forefront of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus throughout the pandemic. It certainly does not help. There is pretty decent evidence that consumers of such news channels are less likely to take the pandemic seriously, are less likely to take measures that will protect their own health, their families and community. It’s a really difficult problem. I don’t know what the answer to it is. Social media is definitely a different issue. There the problem is all of the platforms we rely on, from Facebook, to Twitter, to YouTube, rely on algorithms that are designed specifically to improve engagement, and they do that at the expense of truth and veracity by promoting content that is extremely polarizing and often wrong and dangerous. The algorithms are amoral. They don’t care. They’re just designed to keep you on the site. And that contributes to this vortex of fear and anxiety and uncertainty. I think there is hope for more regulation with these platforms, but it has been slow to come.
Q: There are two important things headed our way in America this fall: an election and flu season. What are the things people need to keep in mind as we approach those two things?
A: On the one hand, the idea of a second respiratory virus that will cause big problems is a galling prosect after having to deal with just one. Some people think that the measures that have been already put in place to control the pandemic such as social distancing, wearing a mask, would also mean fewer people will get the flu. There are also encouraging signs from places like Australia and the southern hemisphere, for example, where their flu season really hasn’t happened very much this year. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen with the flu. I think you should behave as if it is a potential threat. By all means, get the flu shot. Continue to take actions to protect against COVID. With the election, I think it’s much more difficult. That goes into this whole other realm of concurrent catastrophes. … I think we’re in for a very difficult November and possibly beyond that, depending on how the results are called. In some ways, (the election process) is a microcosm of everything we will have to deal with if we get a vaccine. Will that mean then that there will be a rush early (for a vaccine) in an attempt to be a thing that gives the incumbent an advantage? I don’t know. My fear in all of this is, given what has happened thus far in 2020, we should prepare for the worst. We should absolutely take that seriously – we can see now what happens when we fail to do that.
Q: What affects has covering the pandemic had on you in comparison to other subjects you’ve covered?
A: It’s not a happy mental space to be in. To be a reporter on this beat, you have to constantly be immersed in coronavirus news. And coronavirus news is largely tragic. It’s a very grim mind space to inhabit for months on end. There are only a few bright slivers, I think. To be clear, my situation is not as bad as a healthcare worker or an essential worker or any other people making in-person sacrifices to keep others safe and to keep society running. That being said, it is a difficult thing to be doing. I have never both worked so hard to be right while also desperately hoping to be wrong. None of the people reporting on this pandemic want to be right about it. If you look at the evidence in front of us, you see that we are in a very bad situation. I think that we would all rather hope for that not to be the case. I think we all want to go out and about with all of the freedoms we once had. But I don’t think that’s possible right now.
Q: How do you stay positive and hopeful?
A: I look at the people who are fighting hard to make a difference. I look at the friends I know who are trying their best and the experts who generously give their time to walk me through what is happening. They are also burned out, but they are there still doing their best. Looking at the strength and commitment of others gives me hope for society in general.
Comments
Post a Comment