Coronavirus news reporting: Is the medium the message? (2021)

Over the past year, I have been surprised on more than one occasion to have scientist colleagues rant about how badly the broad media are covering the pandemic. I had not noticed this because, like many of us, I had been focusing my reading on primary research publications or those written for our guild, the latter including, for example, the always-authoritative ones in Science by Jon Cohen and Meredith Wadman. But when I started to pay more attention to broad media coverage, I saw examples of what my colleagues were bemoaning. Covering science and medicine for the public can be challenging. Some stories require more fact-checking than a deadline allows, or greater general knowledge of the subject than many journalists can be expected to possess. Here I am referring not to a newspaper's science reporters, but to those covering national news, such as the pandemic's overall landscape. These limitations are less the case for certain radio coverage (NPR excels in all coverage and medicine), whereas for TV, well—there, anything goes, and only the Sunday morning programs and the like have the time for in-depth interviews with experts. A prime example of incomplete, even misleading, pandemic information in the press (and even on one NPR program) concerns the issue of immunity to the omicron variant, either from vaccination or natural infection. In several print and broadcast accounts, I noted that the reporters were saying that there are some indications that the antibodies are less effective against this variant (or words to that effect). In not a single report that I encountered was the issue presented as anything other than a qualitative issue of the antibodies. While the general readership or broadcast audience certainly cannot be expected to know much immunology, it would have been critically important to inform them of the quantitative issue. The distinction is huge, both as science and in the public's perception. The former portrayal sends a message that there is something wrong with those various vaccines—they cannot deal with omicron. The latter sends a very different message, namely about the durability of immunization (again, from either a natural infection or vaccination). Among the several instances of inaccurate or incomplete reporting I have seen since alerted to this by colleagues, perhaps I was particularly poised to be sensitive to the antibody qualitative versus quantitative distinction. While millions of people are tested regularly for coronavirus infection (and tests now coming, specifically for omicron), few are tested for the level of their antibodies to the spike protein that is the basis of all the vaccines (and also the trigger for one of the most prominent antibody responses after a natural infection). I am one of these fortunate people who has had my antibody levels measured, as part of a clinical study. At 6 weeks after my second vaccination, let's call my measured spike protein antibody level 100, just for the simplicity of this editorial. But after another two months, it had crashed to 15! Then, 6 weeks after I received a booster shot, it had gone back up to 100. Of course, the possibility exists that waning antibody levels and a reduced ability of the antibodies to neutralize the omicron variant are not mutually exclusive. And in fairness, the possibility that antibodies elicited by vaccination or by natural infection by the alpha through delta strains might indeed be qualitatively weaker against omicron is plausible, since 30 of its 50 or so mutations are in the spike protein. But should not the general public have been entitled to at least some exposition of this? A second disservice, in my view, has been the rather consistent failure of the media to inform the public of a second line of defense, namely cell-based immunity (T cells). While the vaccine, or natural infection-triggered immune cells (a.k.a. B cells) make antibodies and secrete them into the bloodstream, viral antigen-activated T cells roam and protect in other ways. This arm of immunology may be tougher to explain to the public, but it can be done. How many people realize there is this second line of defense? The title of this piece, of course, plays off the famous quip of Marshall McLuan and also with both the nutrient broth of cells grown to make certain antibodies and the genetic script used to make others. But I could have also used, in support of our endless frontier in biomedical (and all) science, a line by the journalist H. L. Mencken: “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.” And by the way, as to our newspapers, here in the United States, Mencken was with the Baltimore Sun, one of America's best at the time and for years after. If readers want a look at what has happened in that industry, I recommend McKay Coppins' powerful piece.1