HealthNewsReview.org in the news about COVID-19

July 24, 2020

Gary Schwitzer is the founder of HealthNewsReview.org and has been its publisher for 14 years. He has been a health care journalist for 47 years. He tweets as @garyschwitzer or as @HealthNewsRevu.

I’ve been asked to do more interviews in the past six months than in any recent comparable time span.  COVID-19 is almost always the reason for the requests.

Some of the more recent requests were spawned by the JAMA Viewpoint article, Communicating Science in the Time of a Pandemic, that I co-authored with Richard Saitz, MD, of Boston University School of Public Health,

Covering COVID-19: A health check for science journalism –  the cover story of the summer issue of the Gateway Journalism Review (what used to be the St. Louis Journalism Review) –  included interviews with many fine journalists about the challenges of covering the pandemic.

They chose to lead the story by quoting me about what keeps me up at night – personally and professionally.

“Personally, Schwitzer is aggrieved by his battle with board members of his homeowners association, who he said have resisted his recommendation for residents in his Twin Cities condo complex to wear masks.

Professionally, it’s journalism, specifically the state of science and health journalism during a global pandemic that follows a decade during which newsrooms have lost dedicated science and health reporters.”

Among other recent articles mentioning HealthNewsReview.org were these:

CNN’s story, Science by press release: When the story gets ahead of the science.  In the interest of full disclosure, that story probably should have noted that I covered medical news for CNN from 1984 through 1990.

The Washington Examiner’s piece, ‘General public grasping at straws’: Flawed science communications mislead a scared public.

The Association of Health Care Journalists’ Covering Health blog article, Protect readers’ time and bandwidth from unpublished trials.

A blog article from The Center for Health Journalism at The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, How can reporters responsibly cover preliminary research on COVID-19 drugs and vaccines?

And in one week’s time a while back, in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times:

How coronavirus is revealing the problems with ‘fast science.’

How upbeat vaccine news fueled a stock surge, and an uproar