How to End a Pandemic
The How to End a Pandemic project is a Georgetown University initiative to systematically collect oral histories and insights from people who work in epidemics about how to end epidemics. Our guests come from media, politics, medicine, humanities, the social sciences, public policy, and business to help us answer the question “how can we end pandemics in ways that are smarter, faster, more equitable, and more humane?”
How to End a Pandemic
Anna Barry — Going From Photography to Public Health Journalism, The Factors That Go Into How Public Health Officials Inform The Public, Untangling The Threads of Ever-changing Information, Tensions Between State and Local Policy Makers (#1)
Quote: "It became a continious debate over who/what would be impacted by response efforts. Was it worth closing schools to keep businesses open? Only time will tell."
From her humble start as a traveling photographer, Anna Barry-Jester walks us through how she became a public health journalist in the midst of a recession. This exciting role investigating the intersection of health and politics came with the difficult responsibility of balancing priorities in the newsroom. Reporting on Covid-19 statistics mid- pandemic wasn't necessarily profitable to an agency, but she felt that doing so was part of her journalistic responsibility. Even then however, she (alongside many other health journalists at the time) came to realize that untangling the various threads of information and misinformation that had reached the public eye might require more concentrated efforts to break down the media's hyper-partisan tendencies and create a more unified healthcare system.
Links:
Link Tree: http://www.annabarryjester.com/
