How to communicate in a postmodern pandemic

In pandemics, as in war, truth is often the first casualty. 

Throughout history, every outbreak—from the smallpox that claimed Rome’s emperor Marcus Aurelius to Europe’s Black Plague—has spread misinformation along with pathogens. The calamities were attributed to everything from bad air to unbalanced humors. The response was no less misplaced. Beaked masks, bleeding patients, and strapping dead chickens to the sick were all accepted practices. Any theory of germs, let alone viruses, lay centuries away.    

That all changed as medical science advanced. An English doctor named Edward Jenner administered the first rudimentary smallpox vaccine in 1796. Scientists isolated influenza A, the cause of most flu pandemics, in the 1930s, leading to the immunization campaigns that are now our primary line of defense against viruses. But even today it usually takes years to develop and distribute a new vaccine.

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