Behind the byline: Meet epidemiologist-turned-journalist Jess Craig

Welcome to Health(y) Discourse.

Most weeks, this newsletter is about everyone else’s work: a new study, a public health decision, an outbreak or a medical breakthrough making headlines. This week, while I’m on vacation, I’m taking you behind the scenes of how I approach journalism in an increasingly polarized, 24/7 news cycle where health findings are often exaggerated, oversimplified or stripped of context. 

Before I became a journalist, I was an epidemiologist. I worked for international research institutes and U.S. government agencies including the CDC, USDA and US AID. I spent much of my career overseas helping countries prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.

I helped develop and implement disease surveillance systems, collected and analyzed data to track and understand outbreaks and how different viruses spread. I studied diseases like Ebola and the even more terrifying Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, looking for patterns that might help us anticipate where an outbreak would emerge or when it might peak.

I try to bring that training to every health story I report. 

When a new study or paper lands in my inbox with an eye-catching finding, I dig into the methods and investigate how robust the research actually is: How was the study designed? Who was included? How were the data collected? What did the researchers account for — and what couldn’t they account for? 

But I almost never stop at the new study. Whenever I cover research, I dive into the broader body of evidence, sometimes reading dozens of papers to understand what scientists collectively know, what they still don’t know and where the latest finding fits. Does it reinforce years of previous research? Add an important wrinkle? Or contradict what other researchers have found?

That’s important because science is rarely black and white. Progress doesn’t move neatly from one discovery to the next. It advances in fits and starts, zigzagging through findings that sometimes reinforce one another and sometimes seem to point in opposite directions. One study can make a splashy headline, but it rarely settles a scientific question.

That’s the perspective I bring to my reporting: not simply telling you what the newest study found, but helping you understand how much confidence to put in it, how it fits with everything we already know and whether it should actually change what you do.

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced for me why that approach matters. During the crisis, I watched complicated and rapidly evolving science be distilled into simple, sometimes overly definitive messages — not just in news coverage, but from scientists and public health officials themselves. Preliminary findings could be communicated as settled science. Officials sometimes struggled to acknowledge uncertainty or clearly explain why guidance was changing as new evidence emerged. And legitimate scientific debate could be difficult to distinguish from misinformation or political opposition.

I think those communication failures helped widen the divide between public health institutions and the people they were trying to protect. They weren’t the only cause. Politics, misinformation, institutional mistakes and the extraordinary pressures of responding to a once-in-a-century pandemic all played a role. But COVID reinforced for me that trust requires more than telling people what the science says. Scientists, public health officials and journalists must explain how we know what we know, how confident we are in the evidence, why recommendations sometimes change and, just as importantly, what we still don’t know.

That’s especially critical when I’m covering the wellness trends exploding on social media or particularly contentious topics like vaccines, where it can be difficult to separate good evidence from confident claims, political arguments and personal anecdotes.

In those stories, I try to serve as a navigator. I track down studies, read deeply and ask experts the questions that occur to me not just as a journalist or epidemiologist, but as someone making health decisions for myself and my family, too. What would I want to know before taking this supplement? How worried should I actually be about this side effect? How strong is the evidence behind this recommendation? What are the risks of doing something — and of doing nothing? Where do scientists genuinely disagree?

My goal isn’t to make those decisions for you. It’s to do the digging, ask the uncomfortable or seemingly obvious questions and put the evidence — including its limitations and uncertainties — into context so you have the information you need to make a truly informed decision.

I’d love to hear from you about how I’m doing and what I should cover next. What health topics are leaving you confused? What have I missed? What would you like me to dig into? You can always email me at jcraig@san.com and tell me what you think — including when you think I’ve gotten something wrong.

I’m also working on several stories where I especially want to hear from people navigating these issues themselves. If any of these sound like you, I’d love to hear about your experience:

• Has the rising cost of healthcare changed the way you seek treatment or try to stay healthy? Have you delayed care, shopped around, changed insurance, skipped medications or found another workaround?
• Have you changed how or where you get healthcare because you need it to fit your life — weekend appointments, virtual care, retail clinics, home visits or something else?
• Have you left traditional health insurance — or considered leaving it — for an alternative such as direct primary care?
• Have you tried an experimental or unproven treatment because conventional medicine ran out of options? How did you decide the potential benefit was worth the uncertainty or risk?
• Are you navigating the public school or healthcare system for a child with autism or another disability? What’s working, and where are you struggling to access the services you need?
• If you’re a doctor, researcher or other health professional, how is AI changing your work — and what concerns do you have about how it could change your field in the years ahead? 

These are the kinds of stories I want to tell more of: ones that start with the data and evidence but don’t end there. If there’s something happening in your own life that you think deserves a closer look, please get in touch! It might become the next story I investigate.

Have your say

What health question do you wish someone would investigate? It could be something you’ve seen all over social media, a health decision you’re struggling with, a frustrating experience with the healthcare system or simply something you’ve always wondered about. Tell me what you’d like me to dig into for a future story or newsletter by sending me an email at jcraig@san.com or filling out the form below.

What else I’m watching

Get in Touch

That’s all for this week. If you have questions or feedback, send me an email at jcraig@san.com or share it below.

— Jess