I had the pleasure to sit down yesterday with Jessica Malaty Rivera, a science communicator and public health advocate who has built her platform on a core commitment: speaking with authenticity and empathy based on evidence. We talked about what’s broken in health communication right now and what it will take to fix it.
Jessica opened by talking about vaccine disinformation and how the narratives circulating today aren’t actually new. The same emotional hooks—fear about fertility, genetics, and cancer—keep resurfacing, reattached to whatever vaccine or policy is in the news. Helping people recognize those recycled patterns is one of the most practical ways to build what she calls “infodemic resilience”: the stamina to navigate a constant stream of health claims without losing your footing.
Inside the conversation:
We also discussed how money drives misinformation. Jessica made the case that when you follow the dollars, the picture is surprisingly clear. The unregulated wellness industry, which uses pseudoscience and fear-based tactics to sell everything from supplements to IV therapy to injectable peptides, dwarfs pharmaceutical profits, yet faces almost no scrutiny. She’s also started referring to the “anti-vaccine industry,” rather than the “anti-vaccine movement,” because that’s what it is—a business model built on selling distrust.
I raised how challenging it can be to discuss scientific uncertainty honestly and proposed communicating the level of certainty as a range—from things we know with near-certainty, to things that current evidence supports but could shift, to things that we don’t know much about at all. Jessica connected that directly to what went wrong during the Covid pandemic, when public health leaders didn’t effectively communicate scientific uncertainty in real time.
We closed on what communicators, researchers, and career scientists can do when institutions fall short and why exposing the “selling, subscribing, and suing” business model of those purveying health disinformation may be one of the most powerful tools we have right now.
I hope you’ll find this as refreshing and energizing a conversation as I did.
