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When R numbers have been daily news, and medical officers have shared platforms with politicians, Gaia Vince, freelance science reporter reflects on a challenging and exhilarating year of being a science writer.
Photo: Nathalie Lees/The Guardian
This year has had the makings of an epic saga: a monstrous disease that took over the world, killing the oldest, poorest and most vulnerable, imprisoning the population in lockdown – and the heroic scientists who battled day and night to create a miracle vaccine to defeat it. Books are already being written about their quest, and we will rush to read them, hoping to understand more about this terrible pandemic and how it was ended.
It has been an extraordinary year to be a science writer, watching the formerly niche subjects of epidemiology, virology and immunology take centre stage – a bit like how it must be for constitutional law experts when a new Brexit detail is announced. Suddenly, being a scientist – and writing about science – was more interesting to the public than making movies or playing football (especially when neither of these was allowed). The scramble to get a grip on this invisible global killer was all-consuming, and writers rose to the challenge, producing reams of coverage: the disease was only officially named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars-CoV-2) on 11 February; by June, the first book on it had been published...
To give a flavour of the initial pace of change, on 19 January, I was part of a panel “reading the papers” for BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme, and I picked out a story in the Observer about a new Sars-like virus in China that was thought to have affected about 1,700 people. I proposed that we should take the threat of this disease seriously, but my two fellow panellists recommended “healthy scepticism”, saying scientists were “overreacting” and that they were “exhausted by next plague stories”. We were all about to get much more exhausted.
Source: The Guardian
