The infodemic — and the scientists fighting against it | Jessica Malaty Rivera

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
It seems like the health scares are coming faster now, one after another, each with its own flood of headlines, hot takes, and conflicting advice. And when news of an outbreak breaks, the fear tends to arrive first, close behind it a scramble to figure out what's actually true. Public health scientist Jessica Malaty Rivera says that scramble is its own kind of emergency. When a health crisis hits, we're not facing one outbreak, we're actually facing two.

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (0:39)
When we're experiencing public health emergencies, we're dealing with an outbreak of a pathogen and an outbreak of information. And information today is not neutral.

**Elise Hu** (0:48)
In this conversation with TED curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, Jessica talks about what it takes to lead and keep people's trust in a moment when science itself is being questioned and sometimes attacked. She argues that rebuilding that trust won't come from just telling people, simply to defer to the experts.

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (1:05)
People have felt left out of the process and just expected to follow suit, to just obey. And I don't think that that's the right way.

**Elise Hu** (1:13)
For Jessica, a lot of the answer comes down to the quiet human work of earning trust rather than demanding it.

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (1:20)
What's interesting about public health is a lot of times what we see is what we don't see.
The interventions are invisible in that sense, and they're a victim of their own success because when people are doing well, public health is working. And that's what we want.

**Elise Hu** (1:34)
That's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Conversation of the day.

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (1:50)
Hi, Jessica.

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (1:50)
Hi.

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (1:51)
Could you tell us how you define the term leadership, especially as it relates to your work in public health and infectious disease epidemiology?

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (2:00)
Yeah. Leadership isn't always a word that is used necessarily in public health or epidemiology, but it probably has been much more in the last several years as we've just experienced with the pandemic.
And one thing that I always saw that was needed and lacking, and a huge gap in the training that I got, was on making it make sense to people. And that was my opportunity to lead. That was my opportunity to say, how can we connect people to this work? It's very siloed. It's very separate. And if we're talking about things that influence people's decision making and risk budgets and relationships and how they build community, how can I step in and bridge the gap between academia, fancy institutions and the public that it's intending to serve?

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (2:48)
And it seems like there really is no truer test of leadership than in moments where you're doing it in times of unfavorability. And we know right now that public health and science is being questioned, especially in the United States, but abroad. And so I'm interested to hear how you think about courageous leadership in times where your work, the very foundation of what you're doing, is unsupported and in some cases even under attack.

**Jessica Malaty Rivera** (3:16)
Yeah. A potentially unpopular opinion is I do think science is political, because we need good science to inform our politics. We need data to inform the policies that make decisions and make systems available to our public. And what the difference is, though, is that it shouldn't be politicized. And so, what courageous leadership, what being bold in that space has looked like for me, is saying that and connecting with lawmakers and connecting with advocacy groups and even doing a lot of that work myself to make that connection more clear.
The more siloed we are when it comes to science and policy, the more opportunity there is for really dangerous mistruths and claims and conspiracies to fill that gap. And so if we're not using the language of science and translating it so that people who are making these laws and policies understand them and the people who are using their votes and the voices to elect them, then we're missing an opportunity to really make sure that everybody is represented in these science policies.

**Whitney Pennington Rodgers** (4:24)
And I think to sort of take you back on what you're just saying here, you have stood at the center of sort of this tension of communicating these complex unpopular truths and what can feel like a very emotionally charged environment. How do you practice care and encourage and leading in moments where it feels like the political and personal stakes are really high for people in your audience?