Pandemic Spotlight: When Medicine Meets the Media
A Review of Pandemic Spotlight: Canadian Doctors at the Front of the Covid-19 Fight
Throughout this COVID-19 pandemic, most of us have been lost, confused, overwhelmed by information at points, desperate for accurate, relevant, and reassuring guidance. Pandemic Spotlight is a direct sequence of interviews that CBC journalist Ian Hanomansing conducted with infectious disease (ID) physicians. In a sea of misinformation, many ID doctors took on this responsibility, of working as the connecting point between medicine and us (the public), through patiently spending precious time on the media.
These interviews are intimate conversations with Canadian doctors from coast to coast, almost like chatting with our very intelligent friends. They explain their paths and motivations of going into medicine, and how they adjusted to getting huge amounts of attention during the pandemic, and nonchalantly reassure us that the vast majority of the world is good when Hanomansing inquires about the death threats they’ve received.
I’ve watched a fair share of medical dramas. In New Amsterdam, Dr. Helen Sharpe, Head of Oncology, was a “celebrity doctor” prioritizing media interviews, travelling glamorously, and embracing her airing on TV as a prominent voice. She was criticized for neglecting her patients in search of vanity. But even with the outline of Dr. Sharpe lingering in the back of my mind, I realized I couldn’t be wronger about these physicians, who are real people, not TV show caricatures. None of them plugged their books or endorsed their own Twitter handles. These doctors previously worked in the quiet background and were suddenly thrust into the limelight. They decided to sacrifice time out of their busy days just to combat misinformation and to genuinely support us. Being public is exhausting. Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti says that “[When] this is all over, I’ll be quite happy to return to anonymity.” They are serving their communities, plain and simple.
As a UBC Sciences student, I’ve seen first-hand the passion and expertise that Ian Hanomansing captures. It’s really not an exaggeration — beyond the nine individuals Hanomansing has interviewed, there are countless researchers and doctors helping us recover from the pandemic. Over the summer, I started the UBC Vaccine Literacy Club, with a goal to disseminate accurate information to the public and to bridge the gap between the scholarly community and everyone else. And hopefully, to also reduce a few hospitalizations and get us closer to herd immunity.
When I reached out to researchers at CoVaRR-Net in doing a webinar on vaccines, four Pillar Leads, Dr. Jen Gommerman, Dr. Anne-Claude Gingras,
Dr. Nazeem Muhajarine, and Dr. Kimberly R. Huyser all agreed without hesitation, enthusiastic to answer both general questions, and oddly specific ones from people who are vaccine-hesitant, and questions from other people who are simply frustrated and anxious about our return to normal. Our club offered honoraria from a small community grant, but they all declined without a second thought and asked us to put the money towards other initiatives. Not a single researcher was worried about releasing the recording.
I see parallels here. When Hanomansing reached out to these nine ID doctors, all of them agreed emphatically, with so much trust that nobody asked to review the manuscripts beyond the interviews. Personally, I couldn’t help asking to see a Ubyssey article on our club coverage before its release, after a brief half-an-hour interview (I was subsequently declined), can you imagine how courageous these ID doctors are with such public and frequent coverage? Many are working tirelessly to help, not captured by this book. There is diversity in the field of medicine, solidarity and strength in Canadians, and emotion in how human we are and why we choose to pursue our careers.
Hanomansing interviewed nine physicians and brought the conversation to us. And as selfless and supportive these ID doctors are, can we take a moment to appreciate the quality of reporting Ian Hanomansing does? He sees what the public sees, and understands the doubts and curiosities we have, and simultaneously, he appreciates the points of view of these ID doctors, who are tirelessly volunteering their time for the greater good. The conversations in Pandemic Spotlight are candid and without superfluous editing, bringing us paragraphs of direct quotes at a time, artfully rendering the difficult job of providing objective, much-needed information in an echo chamber of polarized opinions. Hanomansing is donating his time, much like these front-line physicians, and royalties will go to the UBC School of Population and Public Health (SPPH), and the Future of Public Health Fund. As a UBC student taking SPPH courses (coincidentally with a recent lecture on “risk communication”), I feel evermore inspired by both doctors and reporters, and the convergence of medicine and media.
In my organic chemistry class, my professor would put up this quote as we trickle into lecture halls.
Isaac Asimov once said, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
It is disheartening that mistrust in scientific foundations exists, and climate skepticism and vaccine hesitancy are physically hurting us as a society.
Reading this book and meeting researchers brings me… renewed hope. Our society is gathering wisdom, and people in multiple disciplines — be it sciences or arts — are working to make knowledge accessible to the public. With teamwork from physicians, scientists, journalists, and communicators, we are gathering knowledge, and our society is gathering wisdom.
Thank you to Ian Hanomansing and Douglas & McIntyre for providing an advance reading copy.
