Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett with Barney Graham, MD, PhD, a physician-scientist, immunologist and former Deputy Director at the Vaccine Research Center. Drs. Corbett and Graham were recognized as Federal Employees of the Year in 2021, receiving the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals for their work developing the COVID-19 vaccines while at the National Institutes of Health
The other lesson is how important our voices are. Hearing a scientist talk about their results directly on CNN was something I had never seen before. There is a different ring to that. I think that the public really appreciated that. We have a long way to go, but I do think that we made some progress on science communication. For the general public, I want people to take heed of what it means to critically think through your health decisions. A pandemic is a very sensitive time. Every single day, you had a choice of whether to be isolated or not. You had a choice to go into crowds with or without a mask. You had a choice to heed guidelines or not or to take a vaccine or not. Every decision is an individual risk assessment. Oftentimes, the best way to determine the risk is to process what you know and attempt to work through what you don ’ t know by asking questions or finding the answer through research. I don ’ t think that we had ever experienced that critical thinking on this scale or frequency. The pandemic presented a very immediate life or death scenario and made people more cognizant of their health. We should keep that critical attitude. Do you think misinformation makes that difficult for people? Absolutely. It ’ s critical for people to understand how to find and discern information, as well as distinguish between credible and non-credible sources. In the early days of the vaccine rollout, there was a supposed nurse who claimed that she had gotten Bell ’ s palsy from her vaccination. She made a viral video. But it was fake, and people reposted it without thinking. One viewer searched the online nurse registry and discovered that this nurse didn ’ t exist. It ’ s those very simple fact-checking tactics that we have to make people aware of. You would very seldom hear a scientist say this, but misinformation has a place. For everything that is true, there is something out there that is false. It would be unfair for scientists to think that we could be allowed on these huge platforms with our data and what we consider to be the truth without other people being allowed to share
4
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker