Science journalist Carl Zimmer spoke at the University of Idaho Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium this Wednesday. Zimmer is a regular columnist for The New York Times and has won a number of awards for his writing.
With the dawn of the pandemic, much of Zimmer’s recent work has centered on COVID-19.
“I’m in awe of viruses,” Zimmer said. “To hijack a cell and make it its own virus factory, that’s amazing.”
Zimmer recalls his first notice of COVID-19 from when there were reports emerging out of China. Wuhan saw a new species of coronavirus that was spreading rapidly.
“We were reporting about science as it was happening,” he explained
According to Zimmer, COVID-19’s first origins in the U.S. stem from a European flight that landed in New York. In response to his piece, former President Donald Trump called his article fake news in a now-deleted tweet.
“So now the Fake News @nytimes is tracing the CoronaVirus origins back to Europe, NOT China,” Trump tweeted.
While this comment resulted in negative reactions to his article, Zimmer was still able use the attention to his advantage. To counter, Zimmer provided clarifications on Twitter to Trump’s claims.
During the past two years of the pandemic, Zimmer has dealt with strong suspicions and responses to his research.
“I got a lot of emails like this,” he said, referring to a screenshot that read “YOU’RE AN EMBARRASSMENT TO SCIENCE & JOURNALISM.”
Zimmer said that people used to feel scientists simply tell them how things work, and that was that. But in the case of the unexpected pandemic, scientists didn’t know and people began to doubt them.
“(They say) ‘I can’t trust scientists anymore’ or ‘ I’ll go do my own research,’ which is Facebook,” Zimmer said.
As information came out and misconceptions were shot down, Zimmer explained that writers had to be cautious.
“We had to be careful to convey what the research was and not just give people a sense of ‘Oh, this is going to be ok,’ because we didn’t know,” he said.
One thing the Trump administration did right, according to Zimmer, was vaccines. Operation Warp Speed implemented finances and support for vaccine research that normally isn’t available. This made it quicker than ever.
With COVID-19 having a monumental impact on all aspects of news, the topic had Zimmer working with people he usually didn’t collaborate with.
“It was an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he said.
He began working with Johnathan Corum and used his specialty in designs to make scientific diagrams and 3D renderings to help readers picture the biology behind viruses.
While the pandemic has the public questioning scientists, Zimmer found that some people are taking the opportunity to learn. For example, Zimmer no longer finds himself explaining things like RNA.
“Because of these vaccines, suddenly everyone was feeling like they need to know more about RNA,” Zimmer said.
Messenger RNA helps the body make proteins by providing a blueprint, creating antibodies to fight disease, which was the basis for COVID-19 vaccines.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other seen in recent decades. SARS has been compared to COIVD-19, yet the SARS outbreak was comparably less impactful, resulting in nearly 800 deaths.
The difference, Zimmer noted, was that SARS could only be spread by symptomatic patients. This allowed doctors to better isolate the disease and stop the spread.
The COVID-19 variant BA.2 has been spreading in China, according to Zimmer. He described the situation in Wuhan as being worse than at the beginning of the pandemic.
“It’s really tragic that this country is going back to something that is actually much worse,” Zimmer said.
While he can’t predict the future, Zimmer anticipates that we have yet to see all of the COVID-19 pandemic’s harms.
“This is a story that isn’t going to end soon,” he said. “We will probably reach a million deaths in the U.S. alone.”
Haadiya Tariq can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @haadiyatariq
Newton's Dad
We learned at a U of Idaho anthropology class in the late 80s that everybody in the world could fit into a space the size of Texas with plenty of elbow room for all. Are you sure this isn't a LA freeway hub vs. British Columbia wilderness fallacy? What do they call that one, Masters ... the "horizon fallacy"? Its dryer these days, you say? How tall were you at age 3, Dad? 3 feet tall, as opposed to those towering snowbanks? You ever watched a toddler struggle in the fresh snowfall? That's the origin of climate change credulity. We scientists believe in absolute objective empirical measurements (facts) and not relative perceptions (opinions).
Saul
Student loan forgiveness? At our tuition-free state university? Hmm. He refuses SS-I payments in 1988 to seek out a less-lucrative minimum wage work instead in 1990. Aren't employees of the university (full-time in summer, 16 hours during semesters) eligible to have their school fees waived? He wasn't eligible for grants/loans until age 22 (was that the rule then?). Three years of fruitless and vain loans in 1993-95, accruing about $10,000 in debt. Compare to that approximately $2,000,000,000,000.00 fine that Facebook recently could've faced.
Neher
"Donald Trump causes earthquakes"? What - is he a prophet? Does he live in the Prophet House between two ferns? My current belief is that relativistic effects can be obtained under ordinary real world conditions - and that's what's deja vu/mystical experiences are. A kind of mind over matter miracle. A very rare and fleeting neurological winning of the lottery, instead of the brute force required to obtain light speed. And according to my limited understanding of E=mc2, any warping of time would result in an enormous associated uncontrolled energy release, somewhat like the anecdotes of those Biblical prophets. Other contenders: Rasputin, Sitting Bull, and Adolf Hitler, who all have that similar vacuous look in their eyes like their brains are wired differently from ordinary people, and who all reputedly had extraordinary good luck.