Bonus: Talking Science Journalism in the Midst of COVID-19 with Wendy Zukerman
00:38:18
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Wendy Zukerman
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
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In this episode, the hosts chat with Wendy Zukerman, executive producer and host of the Gimlet Media podcast Science Vs, about what it’s like to be a science journalist in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and what it’s like to be a woman in science journalism.
Show Notes
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Leila: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this bonus episode of the Lady Science Podcast. Today on the show is a voice that is probably familiar to many of you, and she is joining us to talk about science journalism in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wendy Zukerman is the host and executive producer of the Gimlet Media podcast Science Vs, a show that pits myths and trends against science. Welcome to the show, Wendy.
W. Zukerman: Thanks for having me.
Leila: Thanks so much for talking with us today. So on Science Vs you've been reporting on COVID-19 since late January, when the virus was still relatively isolated to China, but I wanted to go back even before that to the pandemic episode you ran in October 2019, in which you played out a fictional pandemic scenario and even had Anthony Fauci to weigh in on the accuracy of this. And this hit on everything, from border closures to lack of ventilators.
Leila: And I'll be honest, it kind of melted my brain to go back and listen to it now. So I'm wondering what it's been like for you to have gone through this entire fictional scenario months before we had to actually live it and if there's been anything that you've been surprised at how accurate it turned out to be.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. It's been weird. It's been really weird. I'm not gonna lie. It was crazy that it happened. So we dropped that episode, and then just a couple of months later, we started hearing about this virus in Wuhan. And, you know, even at that point, I was thinking, "Oh, this isn't gonna be what we created. Like, that's crazy. Of course not. It'll be contained. It'll be like SARS the original. This isn't that moment.
W. Zukerman: And then we reported on our first coronavirus episode, yeah, in January, as you mentioned, and brought Fauci back because we were starting to get tweets of people saying like, "Whoa, is this happening? Is this happening?" And actually, the purpose of that original episode at first was to comfort our audience and say, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No."
W. Zukerman: Some things have been different. Like our initial fatality rate for our virus was much higher than what this one was, and so our death rate was much higher. And so we could say that, but then I remember when we got Anthony Fauci on the phone that first time to sort of say, "Okay, so, you know, Anthony, remember we talked about that fictional thing? This isn't gonna be like that, right?" And he was like, "We don't know. We don't know." And me and my producer were like, "What? No, but come on." And he was just like, "Wendy, we don't know."
W. Zukerman: And I just remember Meryl Horn and I just looking at each other and thinking, "Oh. Okay. We better watch out what we say." Because we couldn't end the episode with "So don't worry," we just ended it with "We don't know." And then from there it's just gotten weirder, working from home, becoming this character that we created, having experts saying the exact same things that we scripted. That's been really weird. That's been super weird. Yeah.
Leila: Yeah. There was the one episode in late January that you did, which was kind of the first one that you were just talking about, where Dr. Fauci was like, "I don't know what's gonna happen." I remember you asking, "Could what happened in Wuhan with the quarantine of 11,000,000 people happen in a place like New York?" And Dr. Fauci was like, "I very likely doubt it." And I was like, "Oh, God."
W. Zukerman: Right? I mean, it seems so—now it's a testament to how normalized things can get so quickly and also how possibly universal we are. Everyone loves to say, "Well, of course that could happen to China. Well, of course. You know China. China." But actually, you know, in the US we can do the same things, and if that's the right move, we can do that. So in that respect it's been nice. Of course, no one's really focusing on our commonalities at times like this, but we could be.
Rebecca: Yeah. I remember listening to it when the episode dropped back in October, and this morning I was like, "I'll go and listen back to this." And that was an interesting choice for me to make this morning, but I swear to God, I got to the part where there's the dramatization of the argument in an emergency ward about ventilators. And the mother screams at a nurse about not getting a ventilator for her daughter, and I had to stop listening. I was like, "Oh, no. This is something that has certainly actually happened. I can't listen anymore."
W. Zukerman: I remember that scene. Caitlin Sawrey, who was our senior producer, wrote that scene, and when she brought it into one of the edits, we were like, "Wow, this is really powerful, but is it too much? It feels a little melodramatic." And definitely some listeners, when it dropped at the time, said, "This is scaremongering." But we kept it because Anthony Fauci was ultimately like, "Actually, this respirator thing is an issue, and if we did have a huge pandemic, we would have issues with respirators." And that's why we kept it in.
Rebecca: One of the challenging things for being just a human being living through this and trying to wrap our heads around everything that's happening is just the ever-changing information. So guidelines are changing all the time around wearing masks and social distancing.
Rebecca: But then there's the questions related to the virus itself, like we keep hearing different things about where it came from or how it behaves or how it's transmitted. And that must all be even more stressful when you're trying to cover the science in science journalism as a journalist. So what are some of the challenges of covering something of this magnitude that is constantly changing and developing?
W. Zukerman: Yeah. It has been really hard, I mean, particularly because none of us on the team are news journalists, so we're not used to this really fast-paced turnaround, pump out an article, things change the next day, don't worry, just pump out a different article. We are very much slow and steady journalists.
W. Zukerman: We usually take about two months to produce an episode. We take our time. We read all the research on our topic. We pick our favorite scientists. It's all slow and steady, and now we've really had to learn how to twist and turn to not only the changes in the science as you mentioned, but also the changes in how people are talking about something. That's been really hard.
W. Zukerman: Sometimes we'll try to tackle a topic—so for example, just last week we did an episode on asymptomatic spreaders, so this idea of silent spreaders. How many people out there don't know they're sick but could still be spreading this virus? And when we started researching that, we had this great idea. We were like, "There's this really curious study about the Diamond Princess cruise," which was just so—do you remember the beginning of the pandemic when they went—
Leila: Yes.
W. Zukerman: There was lists of countries affected, and then there was the Diamond Princess cruise. At the beginning it was literally China and the cruise. And then on that cruise happened to be one of the best studies that actually followed people and checked who was asymptomatic and who wasn't. And so we were just gonna kinda tell the story of this cruise, but then, maybe it was two days before we were ready to drop that episode, all this discussion blew up around antibody testing and this idea that because the governor of New York started doing antibody testing in New York and these huge numbers were coming out.
W. Zukerman: A quarter of New Yorkers had antibodies to this, whereas a quarter of New Yorkers haven't been tested for the actual virus. And so it just started embedding these questions in people's minds that are like, "Oh, are a quarter of New Yorkers silent spreaders?" Even though scientifically that didn't exactly make sense, just the way it was being talked about changed people's perceptions.
W. Zukerman: And then so all of a sudden we had to say, "Oh, crap, we gotta get on top of this antibody testing thing. We gotta get a new expert. We gotta work out whether these antibody tests are actually a good way to measure asymptomatic people." And so it was just flippin' things around. I think basically every episode has had a version of that, where we think we know the science and then, boom, some study drops and we just have to twist things around and change what we're doing.
Rebecca: My other job is working at the Science History Institute in Philly, and we have a podcast there called Distillations, which covers history of science. But they're starting to do interviews with people who have something to say about coronavirus because you can't work in a science communication organization of any kind and not say something.
Rebecca: And the one thing that's happened, so our producer had scheduled an interview with a biomedical researcher who had done some work on antivirals related to HIV/AIDS. And it was just kinda gonna be about "How do antivirals work? Blah, blah, blah, blah." And then minutes before she went to call him, she was like, "Well, I'll just check the news and see if anything's happened." And it was literally in the middle of the press conference about the antiviral drug that they've been talking about that I literally cannot pronounce.
W. Zukerman: Remdesivir. Is that it? Is that how you—I actually haven't checked. Yeah.
Rebecca: I don't know. It's that one, though. I don't know how to pronounce it, either.
W. Zukerman: A friend a long time ago said that when you can't pronounce things, I always think people are smart because it shows they read.
Rebecca: I like that. I like that. Yeah, like reader's vocabulary.
W. Zukerman: Exactly. Remdesivir. Wow. But then she just had to change the course of her whole interview.
Rebecca: Yeah. So to make this even better, the man she was speaking to was the former CEO of the company that developed it. And so, yeah, and we were like, "Okay, we have to—" And again, they've been planning on doing these quickly, like, "Oh, we'll record them and get them out in a month," which is fast for them. And we were like, "Oh, no. We have to drop this interview now."
W. Zukerman: Yeah because in a month it'd just feel so weird. And who knows where the science is gonna be? Exactly. Yeah.
Rebecca: Exactly.
Anna: Well, so one thing I wanted to ask about was on your show in regular times, you're pitting myths against science. And I think right now there are just plenty of myths and conspiracies and really buck-wild things being said and done around this pandemic. And I assume there's a kind of a sense of additional responsibility to really get things right in this moment. It is kind of like a big global life-and-death situation.
Anna: So has the context of these sort of conspiracies and all this misinformation that's swirling around everything that you're talking about when you cover the virus, how does that kind of stuff change the way that you handle coverage of the virus and present these ideas to the public? How do you talk about conspiracies without kind of accidentally spreading them around more?
W. Zukerman: Yeah. No. It's a really, really good question because there is this constant debate in the team around when is it worth actually interrogating and taking seriously, and when is this just something silly that we shouldn't be giving time to. And I think in my head I have a little bit of an equation that involves how many people believe it; how high are the stakes if people believe it; what is other media saying about it, in that can we add anything new; and then how interesting is the science.
W. Zukerman: And so if you kind of think about a bunch of the myths that have popped up recently, we had the idea of—what was it? Injecting Dettol? I don't wanna put words in the president's mouth. What was it? UV rays into the bloodstream?
Leila: Yeah. Just blast your body with UV light and inject your veins with disinfectant. Don't do that.
W. Zukerman: So, I mean, so with that, immediately basically every news site was like, "No, no, no. Do not do this. Do not do this. Do not do this." And even though the stakes of people attempting to do that would be high, because every other news outlet was like, "This is ridiculous," there was no point in us coming at it saying, "This is ridiculous," too.
Leila: Yeah. I think Clorox even came out and said, "Don't do that."
Rebecca: Yeah. And it's kind of one of those things where all you can say is, "No. This is nonsense." There's nothing else to say.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess we could have really dove into the science of UV rays, kind of bottom line. Yeah.
Leila: But one that you have kind of dived into on the show is the Wuhan lab conspiracy.
W. Zukerman: Yes. Yeah. And I feel like for that, the equation changed because a lotta the news outlets were, at least in their headlines, very confusing. So there was a lot of very legitimate news outlets that had headlines saying things like, "Intelligence services say this could be linked to a lab" or "Sources say this could be linked to a lab." And then there was that big Pew survey that came out that found that 30% of Americans believe this, and so it started to get to the level of, okay, this is big enough. Enough people believe it.
W. Zukerman: The stakes do feel quite high in terms of just the truth is just racism in America. And already we're seeing the rise of Asian Americans getting either verbally attacked, and there are some stories of physical attacks. So there was questions around that. And then just having the honest truth out there. I mean, if people do believe it, it ends up having these huge implications for international relations.
W. Zukerman: But also it's just a huge distraction. I mean, America's gotta solve this, and instead they're like, "But, but, but it was China's fault." And you're like, "Look, it wasn't, but even if it was, you've still gotta solve it for your country." So that was one that we did feel like. And then on top of that, so even then, actually, my editor was like, "I still don't know if I wanna weigh into this."
W. Zukerman: And then I started reading the science of it and the science of how academics find out whether this was made in a lab or not. And once me and Rose Rimler, my producer on this, started looking into it, we were like, "Oh, this is super cool." Like the fact that academics, you know, at the beginning were like, "Oh, this is a legitimate question. Where did this come from?" Viruses have escaped from labs before. And then they look at the genetics, and they can see the clues that show it wasn't. And so those clues were super interesting, and so for us it ticked all the boxes.
Leila: I was gonna ask if you had any tips on how to kind of confront that when you're, as an individual, confronted with that with a person that you know that is usually someone that you would think would be smart and know better.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. This "made in a lab" has really crossed the divide. I have several people who I would consider scientists, not genetics, not researchers in genetics, but an electrical engineer and some other really smart, rational people have been swept up in the talk of this. This guy who got a Nobel Prize for virology also said it, and then all those other—he's gettin' on at the moment. And some Nobel Prize winners have said some pretty nutty things in their time.
Leila: Yeah, they have.
W. Zukerman: I think we're all thinkin' of one in particular. So that really gained traction and became—yeah, it really gained a lotta traction. And I think I cannot fall in the trap of wanting to actually convince people 'cause it's too frustrating and it's too wiggly. Every now and then I feel the need to do it. Something rises within me, and my rational center is fired. And then I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, I can change minds, I can change hearts and minds. Give it a go on Twitter. Yeah, that's a good idea."
Leila: Of all places.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. Yeah. This is where civilized discussion truly happens and minds are changed. When someone truly, truly believes something, I could try. And I could say, "Look, this is the science, and this is the cool science and exciting science." But there's always gonna be some little hole they can crawl into, the shifting sands of the conspiracy theory. "Okay, okay. It wasn't made in a lab. It escaped from the lab. It was already a natural virus that escaped in the lab." And I'm like, "All right."
Leila: It grew little legs and walked right out the door.
W. Zukerman: Exactly, exactly. And then I'm like, "Okay, possible, but here's why I really don't think that's likely. Plus so many diseases came straight from animals, not via scientists. Why do we need to go here?" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don't know for sure." And then I'm like, "Okay, we're done here. I'm giving rational arguments, and you're just like, 'But you don't know for sure.'" You can just hear it in their voice.
W. Zukerman: This is a little inappropriate, but I feel like I can say it. I have a friend who hosts this radio show in Australia. It's not a science show. It's what they call a youth radio station, triple j. And they're big fans of the text hotline, wanna speak out to the youth, that they get that interaction, that audience interaction that youth radio stations love. And he has this voice that he pretends any angry person has, and it's basically like a 13-year-old kid masturbating for the first time. And so that's the voice of "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but do you know for sure?"
Rebecca: That's amazing.
W. Zukerman: Whenever I get too upset at Twitter, I'll just be like, "Oh, yeah, I know you. I know you."
Leila: "I heard this one before." Well, this feels like a weird time to transition to this question, but—
Rebecca: Everything is weird. It's fine.
Leila: Everything is weird now. It's okay. So I think one thing, especially in the US, I think we've come to understand that a pandemic isn't just about sick people, but about a sick system that was unprepared structurally, economically, culturally in just about every way you can think of. So how do you as a science journalist balance reporting the science of the pandemic and this more social aspect of it?
W. Zukerman: Yeah. That is another really good question. I have thought about it a lot because our show, for listeners who don't know our show, you've probably guessed by now I'm quite a lighthearted person and I like to have a laugh, even at things that are serious, because even in life I'm like that. Obviously I'm a human being who has lived and gone through hard times, but just even in my world, I will say the inappropriate, funny thing to try and make people laugh during sad times. That's just how I deal with it.
W. Zukerman: And so I know there's a lot of podcasts who are doing really amazing, heart-wrenching, important reporting on the coronavirus about those social aspects, those individual stories of people getting affected. And I just feel like that's not my place in the media. It's not to say that we haven't interviewed some people and had some sad and emotional moments 'cause that comes both with the science and the pandemic we're living in, but I really see the role of our show as, at a time like this, trying to give people the science that they really want and make it enjoyable to listen to so that you don't need to be as scared as you were. And we do have some people really get that, and they're like, "Oh, I love that when Wendy reports on this, I can hear she has a smile in her voice" even when I'm possibly reporting on things that have consequences and are scary. But I think people feel that.
W. Zukerman: But then we do have at times some people have said, for example, with that lab, did it come out of a lab, some people did tweet and say, "This felt super jarring. Why is Wendy laughing all the way through it?" And I'm like, I mean, exactly. So it's not for everyone. And the truth is, as well, if you've come out of a really bad day, if you've even been listening to an episode that had this super heart-wrenching story in a different podcast and then you go and listen to Science Vs, I could totally imagine that feeling super jarring and being like, "Oh, I'm not in the mood to listen to this right now." So I get it, but I think that's just where me and our whole team has put our flag, and we're gonna still try and make you laugh in these times.
Rebecca: I mean, I feel like Lady Science, we are constantly laughing as we talk about horrible things. Just, yeah, shifting away from the pandemic to science journalism and Science Vs more generally, I'd love to ask a little bit about kind of the structure of Science Vs and maybe how it came to be. Something I find super interesting about the show is that you set it up as this "There is a question, and science has an undisputed answer." That's the branding, sort of. But every single episode is basically like, "It's complicated." And I love that.
W. Zukerman: Sh. Sh. You're giving it away.
Rebecca: I know. I know. "Science is done by humans, and that makes it messy," I feel like, is the thesis of every episode in the end, which I deeply appreciate. And I would sort of love to ask how you chose podcasting for your science journalism career and how you ended up with that particular approach to Science Vs.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. So I fell into podcasting very much, which I think is probably true for a lotta people.
Leila: We say here that we fell dick-first into podcasting.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. So I started out my first job as a science journalist as the Asia Pacific Correspondent for New Scientist magazine, so I was writing print. And then I moved to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation and worked on their science TV show doing research. And kind of all the while, I started dipping my toe into radio, and it kinda became a little bit—like for local radio, whenever there was a science news story and they wanted a non-old-man to talk about it, they'd be like, "There's that Wendy person. She's excited about science."
W. Zukerman: And then it kinda just snowballed from there a little. And so I was getting asked to do more and more interviews about science and science stories. And then the ABC wanted to make a podcast division, and I was asked, "Do you have any ideas?" 'cause they'd heard that science podcasts do really well in Australia.
W. Zukerman: So this was about five, six years ago now. And so not that long ago, I guess. And I hadn't really made that much radio here and there. I'd never made a podcast. I'd only really listened to This American Life and Radiolab. I was a baby podcaster. My housemate was very much into podcasting. She found the whole thing very funny. I was like, "What's that now? What should I listen to?"
W. Zukerman: And then so I made a pilot of Science Vs for the ABC, and it did really, really well, beyond my wildest dreams. And then even more beyond my wildest dreams, Gimlet heard it, which is the company I work for now. And back then that was just this scrappy startup, as we kind of all know. And got this email from them just as I finished my first season that was like, "Hey, you wanna talk?" And I actually missed the email the first time they sent it 'cause I'd just been working these crazy hours to get that first season out. And at that point I was getting a little bit of fan email, like just a little, like one or two. And I was like, "Oh, another one. I'll read that later."
W. Zukerman: And then it's so funny to think about because my actual job, because podcasting wasn't payin' the bills, so my actual job was at the ABC. And I actually remember the moment that I was doing my other job, which was sort of writing science stories. And then I was like, "Oh, there was this email. I should look at that email." And that obviously ended up being like, "Oh, Gimlet. Wait, was that on This American Life? Is that the guy with the shoes? Is that that company?" I wasn't listening to StartUp. StartUp was out, but I wasn't listening to it anyway. I was like, "Oh, I guess they made a company, then. Huh. All right. Yeah. I'll have a chat with you." And I wanna say within several months I was in New York. Yeah. It was absolutely insane. Yeah.
Anna: You mentioned that one of the sort of stepping stones of your career was being asked to do interviews when they didn't want old white dudes to do them. So I wanted to ask about that and about being a woman in science journalism and science communication and what the experience is of that in a field that I think can be very male dominated.
W. Zukerman: Yeah. I mean, for me, I actually feel like at the beginning of my career, being a woman was very helpful, particularly for getting onto radio because there was this kinda push for getting—it's so embarrassing to say different voices when we're talking about women, but that is the truth. And particularly in Australia, at least six year ago, that is the truth, talking about science. So it was helpful, and I feel like it did open doors for me as "Ooh, this woman in science."
W. Zukerman: And I feel like even making Science Vs, it's a mixed picture, particularly when I started, but still now. As you all know, the voice of authority is a man, and it's really fuckin' annoying. And because I have a smile on my face and I'm laughing, there are people who don't think I know what I'm talking about. And it's really annoying, and it comes out when I listen to other podcasts hosted by men that do science.
Leila: Oh, I don't listen to those anymore.
W. Zukerman: No. I mean, not all of them, but a lot of them, I'm just like, "Where are your citations? What is going on?" And I look at their reviews, and they're like, "Love this. So much science. So much science." And then you look at our reviews, and we are just door-to-door science peppered in puns. And at the beginning, there was "Where's the science in this?" And it's like, "Oh, you didn't hear it. The range of my voice was too high for you." And sure, I could say, "Oh, maybe it's something else about the show," but there we have some clear-cut evidence, what I would think. Maybe it's anecdotal, first-degree evidence or whatever.
W. Zukerman: We have had episodes where we'll have two male scientists and one female scientist talking about whatever, different sections, and a couple of people will say, "You didn't talk about this thing." And it's like, "Yes, we did. It just came from the female scientist's voice." Isn't that astounding? And at the same time, that is [unclear 32:42].
W. Zukerman: And then there's also times—now I will caption this all with saying it has overwhelmingly been a wonderful experience, and I absolutely love being a woman talking about science and changing the game in my small, small way that I can. Having said that, there are moments where I'm like, "Would this have happened if I was a woman?" You know how you always play that game. We're all playin' that game. Recently was interviewing a scientist for this coronavirus series, and he started peeing in the middle of the interview. Yes. Yes, he did. And I was like, "What's that sound?" And then he said, "Don't worry about it." Can you believe that?
Leila: Well, I mean, I hate to break it to you all, I've been peeing this entire time.
W. Zukerman: And then, oh, this was actually kind of the special thing about it. So me and my producer—Michelle Dang was producing me for this one—and we both were like—it was early on in the interview, and we were just like, "What the—? Is that—? No, surely. Maybe he was just pouring water." And then so we clipped out the segment of him peeing. And then it just so happens that our whole team, we're all women, and so we were all listening. And we're like, "Sounds like peeing."
W. Zukerman: And then we all independently sent it to our—those of us who have male partners sent it to our male partners to be like, "This is a guy peeing, right?" And then Blythe Terrell, our editor's, partner dissected it. He was like, "I know this pee sound well. Here's what happened. This guy went into the bathroom in the middle of the interview or the beginning, whatever. And then he tried to angle his penis so that the piss was going on the side of the bowl so it wouldn't make a noise. But then he slipped, and that's what we heard."
Leila: Oh, my God. That's the funniest thing I've heard in months.
W. Zukerman: I don't know. We debated so hard whether we were allowed to use that tape 'cause we were gonna be like, "He's a really busy guy."
Leila: I mean, I'm assuming you didn't keep it in.
W. Zukerman: We did not. I mean, that's why I'm getting so much joy telling you guys now. This is my ultimate release.
Leila: We've talked a lot about dicks and penises on this episode today. I wonder if this gets an E rating.
W. Zukerman: Well, we've used them with more of the anatomical [unclear 35:41], so I think it's okay.
Leila: Well, to end on—I mean, that was a pretty light note. To end on something I think that is very fun and something that, well, every person listening will get a sense memory of, is why does grass smell so nice after it rains? And this is something that you've done on your show, right?
W. Zukerman: Yeah. So in the spirit of not dousing people with coronavirus content fully, at the end of every episode we have this little segment called NCVC, which is non-coronavirus content. And it's just fun things out in nature. This week is about a dinosaur, but my favorite one so far was about this science that explains why the grass smells so lovely after it rains.
W. Zukerman: And here's the story. So there's this bacteria that actually pump out that smell, which I did not know. It's a collection of bacteria. They do it when they're making babies, like when they're making their spores. It's to attract this animal called a springtail, which then slides on up to the smell. It's like, "Mm, yum." And then as it's slidin' on up, it picks up the spores of the bacteria. And then the springtail keeps moving, and so the spores of the bacteria can find a new home and a new place to spread. Isn't that cool?
Rebecca: That's so cool.
Leila: That is very cool.
Leila: I don't know what I thought it was. It was a thing that I just accepted was a thing that happens after it rains. I never once asked why.
W. Zukerman: No. I assumed it was nature. I didn't—
Leila: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's just nature. It's nature doin' stuff.
W. Zukerman: I mean, we're not wrong, but I never thought it was bacteria [unclear 37:46].
Leila: Yeah. Well, Wendy, thanks so much for talking with us today. It's been really fun.
Rebecca: This has been wonderful.
Leila: And for everyone listening and looking for some solid COVID reporting or something to debunk a relative's conspiracy theory, check out the Science Vs podcast. And I hope that everyone stays well and stays home.
Image credit: Digital visualization of SARS-CoV-2 | Pixabay
