Jessica Malaty Rivera is committed to debunking science misinformation. As an infectious disease epidemiologist and host of the Peabody-nominated Covid Tracking Project, she has dedicated herself to promoting science literacy in a time when falsehoods spread faster than facts. But she didn’t start out with the intention of becoming a social media educator. Part of it, she says, was to make her life a little bit easier. A lot of her friends and family knew her as someone with a master’s degree in emerging infectious diseases who had worked on pandemic surveillance in the early 2000s. When the earliest signs of Covid-19 were making news, her phone was blowing up with texts, calls, and emails. People kept asking, “Wasn’t this something you were talking about a long time ago?” She would reply, “Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about a long time ago, because it was always a matter of when, not if.” There were so many questions—and so many repeats—that she decided to create a frequently asked questions series on social media. At the time, she had a private Instagram account with 900 followers. She made it public so she could share everything in one place. What happened next surprised her: there was an insatiable appetite for that type of content. People didn’t know where to go or who to trust, and they were hungry for reliable, clear, compassionate information. That experience transformed her work and her sense of purpose. She realized public health communication couldn’t just happen in journals or classrooms; it had to happen where people were, including social media feeds. She brought not only epidemiology expertise but also deep empathy for the fear and confusion of the pandemic, and that combination has defined her mission ever since.
When asked what is important and what is missing in mainstream health communication on social media, Rivera doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There are a lot of variables that make it increasingly challenging,” she says. She remembers early days of Covid when platforms seemed supportive, even“overzealously” willing to warn people and direct them to trustworthy sources like the WHO or the CDC. It felt like social media companies were on her team. That has changed dramatically. Algorithms now classify public health content as political content, and because of that, it doesn’t perform as well. This isn’t an accident; it’s structural. The systems that decide what people see prioritize engagement, outrage, and spectacle over accuracy and safety. Meanwhile, a huge industry of wellness content thrives, often tied to capitalism and consumerism, selling supplements, detoxes, biohacks, and miracle cures. Rivera draws a sharp contrast:“There’s the commodified, capitalist, wellness health section of this type of work, and then there’s mine, which is the altruistic, public health, harm reduction, and educational content. Those two are in very big opposition.” She feels like she is dealing with behemoth forces that may appear to mean well on the surface but lead people into harmful pseudoscience. She also remembers a time when teams helped with content moderation, flagging mis- and disinformation. That support has largely been deprioritized or left to ordinary users, so misinformation spreads more freely. For Rivera, this makes her work not just about making good content; it’s about fighting systems that reward bad content. It’s exhausting and sometimes disheartening, but it’s also why she insists on equipping people with critical thinking skills rather than just handing them facts. If platforms won’t protect users, users need tools to protect themselves. But she remains clear-eyed about what is missing: institutional support, investment in moderation, and willingness to treat public health information as vital infrastructure, not political speech. Without that, even the best content can get lost in the noise.
Rivera is careful not to treat misinformation as a fringe problem; it is central to how epidemics unfold.“With any outbreak of an epidemic, there is almost always also an outbreak of an infodemic,” she explains. An infodemic can be a combination of good, bad, and dangerous information—and sometimes it’s just too much information. Mis- and disinformation are not unique to Covid; you can trace that kind of coincidence back to the beginning of time. Throughout history, claims about treatments and causes have circulated during outbreaks. There is a predictable playbook: fear about fertility, genetic modification, the science being haphazard, authorities hiding truth. Recognizing this pattern helps her respond. Dangerous information makes epidemics worse in concrete ways. It confuses people, causing them to delay important treatment or avoid interventions that could save their lives. It drives people to pursue nonevidence-based recommendations, sometimes causing more harm. It disrupts communities and policy at exactly the moment coordination matters most. Misinformation can make outbreaks worse, prolong them, and increase suffering. Rivera cites a devastating statistic: in 2021, at least 250,000 Covid-19 deaths could be attributed to misinformation. By the time the U.S. had hit 750,000 deaths, vaccines were available, and when the death toll passed a million, she says you can essentially infer that people who withheld from the vaccine—who were the majority of deaths—were unvaccinated.“That’s a terrible consequence—we’re not being hyperbolic.” She says this quietly, letting the numbers speak. For her, misinformation is not an abstract debate about free speech; it has a body count. It makes people sick, keeps them from vaccines, feeds conspiracy theories, and erodes trust in public health institutions. When people ask why she spends so much time online, this is why. She is not just correcting myths; she is trying to interrupt a chain of harm before it reaches another family. Yet she also refuses to demonize people who believe misinformation. They are often scared, overwhelmed, and looking for answers; the system failed them by elevating the loudest, most manipulative voices over the most reliable ones.
Because misinformation is inevitable, Rivera doesn’t want to spend her life playing “whack-a-mole,” chasing every bad claim as it appears. Instead, she wants to give people tools to interpret information themselves, so they have more resilience to an infodemic. Another pandemic will also be inevitable, she notes, and so will another infodemic. The goal is not to memorize every fact but to learn how to think. She trains people to ask good questions, starting with questions about themselves. When you see, receive, or read information, check in with your feelings: Does this make you feel angry? Emotional? Manipulated? Do you feel like there is a hidden truth you don’t have access to? Does it make you hate a certain group or belief more, or love a certain group or belief more? Much misinformation is designed to trigger those reactions, to create a cultish hive mind or tap into existing biases and assumptions. If a piece of content produces a huge emotional spike, that’s a warning sign. Taking a beat—even a few deep breaths—can help you read more soberly and decide whether to share. The next set of questions is more practical: Who wrote this? Why? When? Where? For whom? If people can answer those, they are more likely to read beyond the headline or the lead. Headlines are often intentionally clickbaity; people share them because they are sensational without reading the rest. Rivera wants to raise science, data, and media literacy so people can be better consumers of online information. She is not asking everyone to become an epidemiologist; she’s asking them to slow down, be curious, and apply common sense.“If you feel like you’re being manipulated, you probably are.” This approach respects people’s intelligence while acknowledging their vulnerabilities. It builds long-term resilience rather than temporary correction. In a world where algorithms are optimized to keep us scrolling and reacting, learning to pause and question is a revolutionary act. It also makes public health messages more likely to land, because people understand why they should trust them instead of simply being told to.
Rivera is deeply concerned that public health has become invisible in American life.“It’s a terrible reality that we’re losing the last generation touched by polio,” she says. Those survivors are now elderly in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, still carrying memory of iron lungs and fear. When they pass, the living connection to why vaccines matter disappears. That amnesia already harming public health. People ask, “Why do we need to vaccinate for polio? We don’t have it.” The answer is: We don’t have it because we vaccinated. The absence of disease is the success, but success is invisible. Vaccines are victims of their own success. In a highly vaccinated community, people don’t get very sick or die from vaccine-preventable diseases, so there is no dramatic recovery to point to. A drug given to a sick person has a visible return on investment: the person recovers. A vaccine prevents harm, so the benefit is a non-event. You can’t measure what didn’t happen. This is true beyond vaccines. Clean water infrastructure, air and food quality regulations, traffic laws and safety expectations keep us alive, but we take them for granted. Rivera likes reminding people how furious some people were when seatbelt laws were first introduced; they saw it as a violation of bodily autonomy. Over time, it became accepted collective protection. Sometimes people need a little coaching and preparing to understand the benefit of something, especially when the benefit is invisible.“I deeply hate that public health feels invisible, and that’s why I talk a lot about it.” If people had more language for the things that keep them safe, healthy, and thriving, they would be more appreciative of them. She ties this to the longevity craze. Everyone wants to biohack their way into not aging, yet the two biggest contributors to human lifespan rising beyond 35 are vaccines and clean water. The real hacks are boring: avoid alcohol, stay hydrated, exercise, don’t smoke, get vaccinated, and get good sleep. Public health is not flashy, but it is the foundation. We need to learn to see it before a crisis reminds us it was there all along.
So how do we keep the public health conversation active when the danger fades? Rivera’s answer is people. She wants more people to work in public health, pursue public health education, and especially enter the science communication workforce.“We need more people who can do the really complicated work of making complex things understandable to people,” she says. She feels very strongly that the public understanding of science is only as good as the way we can communicate it.“What good is it doing all this science if people don’t believe it or people don’t trust it?” Science can produce brilliant vaccines, therapies, and guidelines, but if no one can explain them clearly and compellingly, they lose power. It takes a special kind of skill set to translate nuance into everyday language, to acknowledge uncertainty without causing panic, to be honest about what we know and don’t know. Rivera loves teaching those skills. She calls for many more“sense makers” in this world. This is an expansion of her early Covid work: not just making FAQ videos but helping people learn to evaluate information, ask questions, and see invisible structures. She remains hopeful despite the difficult algorithm fights and infodemics, because the appetite for trustworthy content is real. During the pandemic, millions sought out her work; that hunger didn’t vanish. There are communities of public health communicators, educators, librarians, clinicians, and teachers, all trying to make science make sense. Ordinary people can join, too: by sharing reliable information, asking good questions, appreciating public health infrastructure, supporting science literacy in their communities. Rivera’s own journey from a private Instagram account with 900 followers to a national platform shows what one person asking“What do you need?” can do. We all have a role. We can be sense makers in our own circles, whether by correcting a myth gently, modeling thoughtful consumption, or simply pausing before sharing. Public health is a collective project; keeping it visible requires all of us. If we do, we’ll be better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic—and more likely to protect each other along the way.