Faye Flam

Scary headlines about the long-term effects of Covid gain traction easily. Recent news reports have warned that “even mild Covid can cause brain shrinkage,” “memory loss” and “long term” “brain damage” that “greatly” changes the brain “as much as a decade of aging.” Over time, that fear is likely…

Last week, the US Congress failed to approve $15 billion needed to continue Covid-19 precautions, even though today’s low case counts are likely to rise, as they are in Europe, with the sub-variant called BA.2. We’ve learned that some expensive mitigation measures, such as deep cleaning, are a…

We are now in Covid limbo. Cases are down and still falling, yet scientists aren’t willing to declare the pandemic over — or, conversely, to predict when the next wave might come. But perhaps it’s a good thing that public health officials are displaying a little less confidence. Researchers still…

Covid-19 has been pushed off front pages by falling case counts and other news stories, though the pandemic’s threat hasn’t really changed — we’re just in the trough of the last wave. Nonetheless, it was strange to hear President Joe Biden talk in his State of the Union address as if the pandemic…

Almost everybody wants to be seen as embracing science. That’s true whether they are arguing to take masks off or leave them on, or whether they’re pushing continued caution or a return to normal. The phrase “follow the science” has been used by the left to defend its Covid policies and lobbed back…

Post-infection immunity might be a strange topic for political strife, but it touches on Covid vaccine mandates and whether those who’ve had the virus should be exempt. And so when publications such as The Hill run headlines such as “CDC Finally Recognizing Natural Immunity – Legislators should…

People think they know misinformation when they see it. But I’ve spent more than a year studying medical misinformation as part of a Pulliam Fellowship and have come to find the term isn’t particularly enlightening. The dictionary calls it “false information, especially that which is deliberately…

States across the US have dropped their mask mandates this week, worrying Americans who think they’re still needed and cheering people who are ready to go “back to normal.” Both groups need to take a deep breath: Dropping mask mandates isn’t the same thing as ignoring Covid-19. Masks have been…

The right and left may not agree on what constitutes misinformation, but both would like to see less of it on social media. And as the world faces the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the threat medical misinformation poses to public health remains real. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have…

Predicting how Covid-19 will behave next remains notoriously hard. Predicting how humans will react is much easier, since history can be a guide. One of the most prescient articles written about the pandemic’s future was Gina Kolata’s May 2020 New York Times article “How Pandemics End,” with…