When news broke that the Biden administration was preparing to recommend coronavirus vaccine boosters, Peter Hotez’s phone and inbox started blowing up. Hotez, a seasoned vaccine scientist and dean at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine (with more credentials than can fit in this sentence), is one of the most sought-after COVID experts of the moment, as evidenced by his three-day parade of press appearances to talk booster shots: The Lead With Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper 360, Don Lemon Tonight, At This Hour With Kate Bolduan, Morning Joe, Stephanie Ruhle Reports, Katy Tur Reports (with Geoff Bennett subbing), All In With Chris Hayes (with Mehdi Hasan subbing), MTP Daily With Chuck Todd, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, NPR, SiriusXM, Yahoo Finance, and a dash of local radio thrown in for good measure. Plus, he also found a few minutes to speak with me—not about COVID or vaccines, but instead his newfound media profile. “It’s like having two full-time jobs,” said Hotez, one of the lead researchers on a vaccine candidate called Corbevax, which he hopes will soon be rolled out to the developing world. “The key thing is trying to keep up with the lab research and the papers and do all the media and public outreach. I love both.”
Every blockbuster news cycle, from foreign conflicts and political scandals to missing airplanes and mega-trials, brings with it its own set of uniquely qualified talking heads to translate the arcana: intelligence analysts, pilots, legal experts, retired generals, campaign operatives, prosecutors, and so on. For the past year and a half, perhaps no experts have been more in demand and omnipresent than those steeped in the science and policy of the pandemic, a once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully!) pestilence that has consistently dominated the headlines in a way most of us have never seen.
Meet the COVID commentariat: an influential army of virologists, epidemiologists, infectious disease doctors, vaccine scientists, emergency room physicians, and public health figures who have gone from relative obscurity to household names. Before all of this started, many of them were happily toiling away in the anonymity of their labs or research institutions. Now they have massive numbers of Twitter followers who hang on their every word, sharing the links they tweet to esoteric preprints and @-ing them to ask if it’s okay to meet up indoors with fully vaccinated friends. Everywhere you turn, there they are: on cable, in The New York Times, on your Facebook feed, on the radio when you’re driving around to run errands in the middle of the day, when you used to be at work. Pre-COVID, you had no idea who any of these people were, and if some random bat hadn’t ruined everything, there’s a good chance you still wouldn’t know who they are. (Remember when the name Anthony Fauci didn’t immediately ring a bell?) Now you’d probably pay good money for the chance to pick their brains over dinner or a drink—outside and six feet part, naturally.
“When virologists are suddenly in demand, it’s a sign of the apocalypse,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I’m a researcher and virologist. I inoculated mice in a windowless concrete block room for 20 years. I’m somebody who worked in a lab seven days a week. What were my joys? Going to a meeting called the ‘double-stranded RNA meeting.’ And then, suddenly, you’re on television. You’re a television person. I was on MSNBC this morning and on CNN midday. I can promise you that inoculating mice was the opposite of training for that.” There’s something about it that makes Offit a bit uncomfortable. “Occasionally people will stop me on the street because I’m on TV that much. It feels wrong.” He said CNN offered him a contributor contract worth $25,000 for three months. (He declined.) He’s been interviewed on camera for several documentaries. The filmmaker and producer Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Black Swan) consulted with him for a pandemic-related project, he said. “I think it’s important for voices like mine to be out there,” Offit told me. “But on the other hand, it is worrisomely seductive.”
If COVID-19 had happened in the days before Twitter was as influential as it is now, we wouldn’t have had direct and constant access to these experts. Their feeds are a public service, and once you start following enough of them, you feel like you always know about the latest study on transmission dynamics, the most recent statistic about cases rising or falling, the newest piece of either grim or uplifting science the very moment it drops. At the same time you also start to realize that even the best and brightest in a particular field often have conflicting views. Some are criticized for being too upbeat and optimistic. Others take heat for spreading doom and gloom. (Don’t look at Eric Feigl-Ding’s Twitter if you want to sleep well tonight.) It can make it hard to know what information is the most solid, but it also gives you a range of highly informed perspectives to shape your own judgment—a sense of control amid the chaos of an interminable public health emergency.
“I’ve been accused of having a really positive view, which has upset some people,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. “Even though this is all very painful, I do have a view of it. I know it’s going to end, and how it’s going to end is through immunity. I keep on just trying to move us forward in terms of saying, I’m sorry delta happened, but then again, it’s gonna cause a lot more immunity. I have this kind of message and I see things that I wanna say clearly, but I actually hate it because I’ve never been attacked before or considered controversial.” Gandhi told me a day doesn’t go by without “one or more” media requests. She didn’t join Twitter until April 2020; now she has tens of thousands of followers, including lots of prominent journalists. “My hope is that when it ends, I’m going to get off Twitter forever,” she said. “It feels like I have to do this, because I feel an obligation.”
In addition to tweeting, going on TV, and giving endless sound bites to print reporters, some members of the COVID commentariat are creating their own media. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, does a weekly podcast called The Osterholm Update. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, teamed up with The Providence Journal on COVID: What comes next. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, runs a company called Just Human Productions, for which she hosts American Diagnosis and Epidemic, in addition to her frequent hits on the broadcast and cable networks and her writings in major news publications.
Andy Slavitt, who was a senior adviser and vaccine-outreach czar on President Joe Biden’s COVID response team, has gone from little-known public health official to Twitter phenomenon and podcast host. Slavitt got his first taste of niche social media celebrity as the acting head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. (He took to Twitter to evangelize about the Affordable Care Act.) He’s not a doctor or a scientist or a politician himself, but he has access to all the big ones, and he talks to them regularly. So at the beginning of the pandemic, when he started distilling everything he was hearing and learning about COVID into digestible Twitter threads, his audience skyrocketed. (He’s up to nearly 690,000 followers.) As Slavitt put it, “I classify myself as sort of the outsider’s insider.”
In April of 2020, Slavitt partnered with Lemonada Media to create a biweekly coronavirus podcast called In the Bubble, on which he’s interviewed everyone from top government officials (Fauci, Jen Psaki, Rochelle Walensky) to politicians (Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Phil Murphy, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Amy Klobuchar); celebrities (Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, Kumail Nanjiani); journalism and media big shots (Kara Swisher, Chris Hayes, Bill Kristol, Mark Cuban, Nick Clegg); and of course his many fellow luminaries of the COVID commentariat. Slavitt told me the podcast makes about $20,000 a month in sponsorship revenue, but he donates his cut to COVID relief causes. (Same as he does with his book for St. Martin’s Press: Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response.) Slavitt said he gets about 15 to 20 inquiries a day, and he estimated that he’s done between 40 and 60 media hits in the past month. (He turned down a contributor contract with a network that he declined to name.)
“When I was a kid,” said Slavitt, “if you’d have asked me when I was 12 years old what I wanted to be when I grow up, I would have said I want to be a journalist. I’d have said that I’d be a foreign war correspondent. So I’ve always had an interest.” At the same time Slavitt knows he has a sell-by date. I asked if he wanted to keep creating content even after the pandemic eventually winds down. “I think people will stop being interested,” he said, “and I have no interest in talking to myself.”
Like Slavitt, Hotez already had some experience putting himself out in the public domain before COVID. He’d done a bunch of TV in the past around issues like the Zika virus and the anti-vax movement. (Last year Hotez published Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, about his daughter, for Johns Hopkins University Press.) But nothing nearing the level of his current media visibility. Hotez said he strives to “convey the nuance and complexity to the science. I think that’s why people have appreciated my being out there on the networks.” By now he’s used to having a target on his back. “I get it, the army of patriots is gonna hunt me down,” he said. “What really ramps it up is when Laura Ingraham targets me on Fox News or if Breitbart goes after me.” On the bright side, Hotez no longer has to speak out against people like Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, or Mark Meadows. (Though some Republican governors are giving him a run for his money.) “Those guys had adopted an anti-science platform,” he said, adding: “I don’t like talking about [politics], but if you wanna save lives, you have to do it.”