418: Remembering STAT’s Helen Branswell

0:05Helen Branswell: Welcome to this week's episode of The Read Out Loud, a weekly biotech podcast from STAT. I'm Alison DeAngelis.

0:12STAT colleagues: I'm Adam Feuerstein.

0:13Helen Branswell: And I'm Elaine Chen.

0:25STAT colleagues: biotech moves fast blockbuster clinical trial wins brutal drug blow-ups shifting market tides if you're not paying attention you're already behind that's why i write biotech scorecard every thursday morning i cut through the noise and break down what matters right now data deals and the people and companies making real moves. It's unfiltered analysis from someone who's been covering biotech for more than 20 years. If you want to keep up and stay sharp, subscribe to Biotech Scorecard, only for StatPlus subscribers.

1:03STAT colleagues: A giant in public health journalism has left us. On October 13th, our colleague Helen Branswell passed away after recurrence of breast cancer. She was 69 years old.

1:20Helen Branswell: On this week's special episode of The Read Out Loud, we will remember Helen and pay tribute to the incredible life and legacy she left behind. Helen was a renowned infectious disease reporter who earned the respect and admiration of experts and public health officials with her authoritative, prescient reporting on the flu, polio, Ebola, and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

1:47family and public health leaders: Most importantly, Helen was someone that the public trusted for accurate, science-based reporting. They turned to her time and again for help understanding some of the scariest and complicated health challenges of our time.

1:59STAT colleagues: We heard from so many people who simply said of Helen in her reporting, she helped me get through COVID.

2:07family and public health leaders: Here she is in a 2022 stat video sharing her thoughts about the pandemic. A sad reality of this pandemic is the fact that it has been made much worse because of misinformation, disinformation, political muckraking. It's been a challenge to know when not to amplify something that is untrue, because even if you are trying to poke holes in something, you're further disseminating the false information. So it really has been a balancing act trying to figure out when it makes sense to do that and when it makes sense just to ignore something and move on. Coming up, we will hear about Helen's legacy from her colleagues, family and the public health leaders who relied on her reporting.

2:55family and public health leaders: But first, a word from our sponsor. We wanted to start today by speaking to Stats Executive Editor Rick Burke. Rick hired Helen Branswell at Stats Beginning in 2015.

3:07STAT colleagues: Hey, Rick. Welcome. Thanks for having me.

3:10family and public health leaders: Rick, how did you first learn about Helen? What led you to hire her as one of Stott's first reporters? My first day starting Stott, I was in the Boston Globe building in the middle of a winter snowstorm.

3:26STAT colleagues: And one of the editors at the Globe from Canada came up to me and said, this reporter in Canada, Helen Branswell, might be good to talk to for a job. and I had no idea who Helen Branswell was. I didn't know what I was doing my first day starting a whole new news organization, but I didn't have a whole lot going on. So I called Helen that first day and talked to her and I thought, is that going to have an infectious diseases reporter? Because I didn't know that. I was just starting from scratch. I knew we wanted to cover biotech and pharma and science. And do we need infectious diseases? And what changed my mind where I knew we had to hire her was when I talked to a respected journalist who said, Helen Branswell is the best infectious diseases reporter in the world.

4:20STAT colleagues: And I knew, like, even if we don't need an infectious diseases reporter, I want to hire the best reporters in the world. And that's when I knew I was hiring Helen. And right at the beginning when we launched that. You made this great decision to hire Helen Branswell, and then you started working with her. What stood out to you about Helen's work? If I had to say one word, it was authoritative. She knew what she was talking about. During COVID, I saw it again and again and again. She was bombarded with people who had doctor in front of their names who wanted to be quoted about COVID. And she said, they know nothing about what they're talking about.

5:02STAT colleagues: She knew from her whole history who was credible and who wasn't. And damn it if she was going to quote anyone who didn't know their stuff. And I've never seen a reporter so careful and meticulous and caring about where the information is coming from. She was never overstated. She was never alarmist. But she was direct with the facts. And again, it just kept coming back to this reporter speaks with grand authority.

5:35family and public health leaders: You know, Helen was one of the earliest journalists to alert the public about the potential threats of COVID, how serious it could be. You mentioned to us that there was one specific turning point for you, an event that you attended with Helen. Tell us about that night.

5:51STAT colleagues: It was March 7th, 2020. I was moderating a panel on COVID at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Helen was on the panel with a couple other public health experts. And this ended up being the last event before everything shut down. I remember asking people in the crowd, were you worried about coming out tonight? Because people just hadn't really dawned on them. and Helen told the crowd,

6:23family and public health leaders: You know, having written about the possibility of something like this for years, I still find myself really startled that it's happening and I don't know why that is.

6:31STAT colleagues: When I heard those words on stage, for Helen to be startled, I took that really seriously. Helen was not someone who would easily be startled. But then it really sunk in when after this event, Helen and a few of us went out for dinner in Cambridge and she looked at me and said what are you going to do when people at STAT start getting sick and she said you know they're going to cancel the Olympics which it's true that happened she was prescient and and she was right She took this seriously in a way that no other reporter had identified this threat coming. She saw it before Anthony Fauci. She saw it before a lot of the experts.

7:22STAT colleagues: How often do you see a reporter linked to one big world event as the go-to person they turn to? And again and again and again, you hear that not just from public health experts, from scientists, but from readers who trusted Helen. And let me also just say, in March of 2020, our readership went from something like a million to 26 million that month because of Helen.

7:56family and public health leaders: At what point did you realize Helen was that reporter that all these experts trusted?

8:03STAT colleagues: I knew from the beginning when I was told she was the best in the world of what she does, I knew she was respected. Long before COVID, Bill Gates came calling to STAT to talk to Helen and I. And the only reason I thought Bill Gates would talk to a fledgling small outfit like STAT was Helen. I mean, she brought such credibility. So I'd see people like Bill Gates lining up to talk to her. But I really knew it when I read the New York Times story about Stat and Helen's coverage of COVID that quoted an expert saying she's a godlike figure in our community. That's when I thought, wow, that's more than I even knew.

8:48STAT colleagues: The other thing I want to say about her is she had no patience for showboats and people who are about themselves. And she was in the Canadian tradition of being not about herself, not about Helen. She cared about the work and she cared about COVID and what was happening to the world. She felt this very deeply and personally. And back in February of 2020, the New York Times called her to do a profile of her. And she told the reporter, absolutely not. I'm not cooperating. She said, it's not about me. I don't want to do it. And I told Helen, you got to do it. I don't know a reporter anywhere who would turn down the opportunity for a positive profile in the New York Times.

9:43STAT colleagues: I pushed her, and she finally acceded to talk to the reporter, but she said, only if it's about stat and not just about me. She cared about the story, and she didn't want to draw too much attention to herself, which is probably why I don't know what she would say about this podcast.

10:03family and public health leaders: Rick, what do you think Helen's legacy is, and what do you think we can all learn from her? Her legacy is a kind, caring human being and journalist who really cares about the truth.

10:21STAT colleagues: The model reporter, someone who writes with clarity, prescience, and sees around the corner in a way that most other reporters cannot. and her legacy for STAT is we will continue aggressively to cover infectious diseases. I don't know who will do it, but we will do it. And if you had asked me that 12 years ago, I might not have known we'd even cover this. But I have learned forever there's no more important story in health and medicine, and Helen showed us that.

11:05STAT colleagues: Rick, thanks for sharing your thoughts about Helen. Of course.

11:17Helen Branswell: Well, we thought there was no one better to talk about Helen than her sister, Brenda Branswell. Brenda, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

11:25STAT colleagues: Thanks for having me. So, Brenda, we know Helen as this reporter, as this legend in public health journalism. you were her younger sister tell us a little bit about Helen growing up you know I always thought

11:39family and public health leaders: my sister you know was very smart she was six years older than me so my recollection of her growing up in a you know a full house with five other siblings is Helen often had her head in a book she loved to read she loved to experiment in the kitchen baking she loved sports she wasn't a huge athlete but she was the manager of the high school basketball team and then she went off to college when I was still fairly young. And then she embarked on her journalism career.

12:07Helen Branswell: It's so striking to hear that so many people in your family are journalists, including Helen. Did she always want to be a reporter?

12:16family and public health leaders: No, she didn't know what she wanted to do after she graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. She felt that she could write and she just sort of, in her words, you know, fell into journalism and got a job at the Daily Gleaner in Fredericton, New Brunswick. And she said the first winter that she was there as a freelancer, everybody got sick with the flu except, you know, her. And they kept calling her in. And she eventually got hired full time by the paper and loved it.

12:46Helen Branswell: Wow. So her journalism career really always tied back to infectious diseases. She got her start because of influenza, it sounds like.

12:54family and public health leaders: It's ironic, isn't it? I don't think the irony was lost on her either.

12:59STAT colleagues: You know, it's one thing I appreciate about Helen and learning more about her is that how she sort of got into public health reporting a little bit later on in her career. What did she tell you about that and her decision to join STAT and to become this legendary, widely respected public health reporter reporting about infectious diseases?

13:18family and public health leaders: If I can just backtrack a teensy bit, she started covering health when she was at the Canadian Press. And then she got a night fellowship at the CDC that she told me recently was career altering. And she had been covering SARS in Toronto. And as time progressed, I just think she was increasingly interested in infectious diseases and public health and global health. And the opportunity at STAT was just, it was a fantastic one. And she really, truly loved working at STAT and the great group of people that she worked with there.

13:48STAT colleagues: One of the things about Ellen, she had this reputation as someone who would hold public officials to account. Whether it's someone who ran a public health agency or a politician, she was not afraid to ask the tough, penetrating questions, you know, maybe to skewer them a little bit. I wonder, was she like that at all when she was growing up?

14:09family and public health leaders: Well, you know, my sister, my sister could be a bit blunt and a bit rough occasionally. For sure. Yes, she could. And she would admit that. But, you know, the flip side is that she was like a behind-the-scenes operator, always trying to be thoughtful and help people. I mean, I think that you have to ask tough questions in journalism.

14:29STAT colleagues: I think that's one of the things that even the public officials that she interrogated appreciated about her, you know, that she was unafraid. And she asked these deeply penetrating, well-thought-out questions. She was asking questions about things that they hadn't even thought about.

14:46Helen Branswell: What do you think that people should remember about Helen? What do you want her legacy to be?

14:52family and public health leaders: I think it's the way she covered infectious diseases. She really did it with great rigor. There was no sensationalism in her work. It was really evidence-based. It was a really important public service, especially in an era of mis - and disinformation. And also, we forget now, but things were frightening at the start of 2020. money. So Brenda, Helen died from a recurrence of breast cancer. What were her last months like? You know, very sadly, like she found that her cancer had returned just as she returned home to Canada. So that was not the next chapter in her life that she hoped for. And obviously that we wished for her.

15:36family and public health leaders: She was working this past year for STAT, obviously not at the same pace, living independently and I was back and forth from Montreal obviously a lot. She was doing an interview in her office for stats. She was writing a story and she just came out of her office and said this job is a gift and I think this will resonate with cancer patients. When you're running off to medical appointments and scans all the time it was a real comfort to her to be able to do the work that she loved especially this past year.

16:16STAT colleagues: Brenda, we really appreciate you spending some time with us and sharing your thoughts about your sister and from the Statt family. You know, we just want to express our condolences to you and the entire Brandswell family. And thanks again for joining us.

16:32family and public health leaders: Thank you. It really means a lot to us.

16:57STAT colleagues: My name's Gideon Gill, and I'm a managing editor here at STAT, where I worked with Helen since that launched 11 years ago. She was so early into writing about a potential pandemic. She alerted people to the dangers, and she wrote very precisely and in a very nuanced way what was happening, what people could do to protect themselves and their families. And I think that saved lives. She knew things ahead of when a lot of public health leaders knew things. And that became evident to me in those first months of COVID. She wasn't caught up in writing fancy phraseology and flourishes. It was straight ahead.

17:48STAT colleagues: She was the Joe Friday of journalists. Helen was not afraid to speak truth to power. There were a number of occasions where she confronted public health officials, including Tony Fauci, then CDC director Robert Redfield. They'd had no news conferences in over a month. And she called them on that and said, why haven't you been out there talking to the public? And she called on others about downplaying the extent of the threat. And she was not afraid to say that. which goes a little bit further than many journalists would in terms of directly confronting officials like that.

18:35STAT colleagues: When Helen was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist with two of her colleagues here at STAT, I congratulated her, and in very typical fashion, she deflected my congratulations and said it's lovely recognition of Statt's work, which I think really just shows what she was like. Just so much caring about Statt and about her colleagues. Journalists can make a difference. They make a difference by thorough reporting and gathering of facts, not by speculating or offering opinions. It's all based in incredible diligence and presenting the information extraordinarily clearly. Yes, there's a loss, you know, I think for public health in having her clear voice and insights.

19:36STAT colleagues: But for me, it's mainly about losing a very good friend. My name is Dr. Anthony Fauci, and I have known Helen Branswell for many years, dating back to the time that I was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH. Helen was not what we refer to as a derivative reporter, namely somebody who reports what other people report. Helen was her own person who delved deeply into the subject matter. She wouldn't allow the person whom she is interviewing to say something cursorily and get away with it. She has a very well-known reputation of holding her interviewees' feet to the fire.

20:32STAT colleagues: I had so many interviews with her that I can't pick out whether it was about Ebola or Zika or HIV or COVID or monkeypox. But I would make a statement and she would never accept it because I'm Tony Fauci. She would always come back and say, well, what do you mean by that? And why do you come to that conclusion? which made for some really, really good reporting. I say this without hyperbole, that if we had a couple of thousand Helen Branswells, we would be able to much more effectively counter the tsunami of misinformation and disinformation that we're experiencing. Because in our society, There's so much untruths being propagated out there that the people who are reporting things correctly, like Helen did, are in a minority.

21:38STAT colleagues: I think we should learn from her legacy what an important impact the kind of reporting that Helen did has on public health. In the arena of a public health crisis, it becomes even more apparent that correct information saves lives because incorrect information endangers lives. It isn't a trivial matter. The impact of Helen on public health was not trivial. And I think that's the lesson. And maybe that would inspire particularly young people coming up in their careers to try and emulate Helen, because we need more of that.

22:28Helen Branswell: My name is Drew Joseph. I'm a reporter at STAT, and I worked with Helen for 11 years. I started working with Helen really early on in STAT because the Zika epidemic was such a big story that they wanted some extra help on it. So they asked me to pitch in on some of the stories and learning how to cover a public health emergency from Helen Branswell is basically like learning how to play tennis from Serena Williams. I think everyone who's listening to this knows how remarkable of a reporter Helen was and how clear her writing was, just how smart she was. But she was also quite a character.

23:06Helen Branswell: I think everyone in the office knew about her personal vendetta against whatever weather pattern it was that meant planes landing at Logan went over her apartment. And if anyone talks about how they were going to Cape Cod for the weekend, you knew that they were about to get an earful about the shark situation there. I think she had a shark tracking app on her phone. She knew a lot about what was going on with the sharks on the Cape.

23:31STAT colleagues: Helen liked working at Statt. Helen loved her colleagues, and we were really lucky to have her as a colleague and a friend for so long. This is Jason Uchman. I was Helen's editor for the past 11 years. And when I think about Helen, I'm struck not only by her brilliance, but also her work ethic and how much she put into the job she did for the past 11 years and long before that, of course. And I think she did that because she cared. She was devoted to the craft because she believed in what she did. She believed in the power of information and she believed in the importance of journalism. And I am so grateful for that.

24:14STAT colleagues: I'm Alex Hogan, senior multimedia producer at Stat and host of Stat's video series, Status Report. Helen sat one row behind me so I could hear her reporting. And very early on the pandemic, when people are still trying to grasp, you know, what is this going to be? Is this how bad could this be? You know, still very early on. You tell it. Helen was still trying to try to suss that out. And she was on the phone with an expert. and Helen had to like gently correct this expert she was like oh no there's been new cases reported you know that apparently this expert I could only hear one side of the conversation but from what I could gather you know Helen's like oh no there was you know a new batch of cases reported and you could tell that whatever it was about those cases alarmed this expert and then Helen in turn was alarmed and she was not prone to catastrophizing or alarmism you know and she hung up the phone and said to no one in particular she was just like we're so fucked and Helen was not setting off alarm bells and she wasn't standing up and going hey guys we're fucked she just said it quietly to herself but I knew enough from knowing her well enough that like I'm witnessing the beginning of something that's going to change the world you know that probably made me one of the first people in the country to actually have to come to grips with and grasp like how bad COVID was going to be quite literally a front row seat to something that was going to be this world historical event that's changed everything.

25:31family and public health leaders: My name is Rochelle Walensky. I'm a professor at Harvard Medical School, and I am the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Helen had her finger on the pulse of what was changing and when it was changing and why. And because she was such a phenomenal reporter, she had so many people who trusted her reporting. Helen was their go-to. Helen never had an agenda. Her agenda was getting the science right. Her agenda was pointing out all of the things that the evidence would say, digging deep and making sure and confirming the facts, and in a way that was so scientifically sound, she just knew her stuff.

26:13family and public health leaders: You know, so much of the media is about the headline, or it is about the clicks or it is about how much attention it will get. I never got the impression that Helen wanted the attention or the clicks. She wanted to get it right. STAT and I think Helen herself has a brand of being right. In July of 2021, we started to recognize an outbreak from the Delta variant. And we learned in that outbreak that even if you were vaccinated and you got infected, that you could transmit to others. That was new. And we made the decision to put masks back on for those who are vaccinated. That was a really hard decision.

27:06family and public health leaders: We knew we were going to get a lot of blowback. We did get a lot of blowback. And the question in my mind at that time was, do you make that decision and put out that policy when the paper wasn't quite ready and say the data will be forthcoming, but here's the policy. And I remember Helen's report that day saying, Walensky released a new policy, but she didn't show us the data. She was right. I think I remember calling Helen, actually, when the data were released and saying, here they are. But we have that kind of relationship because I really, really trusted her. And trust in those environments is really hard to come by.

27:50family and public health leaders: And boy, did she earn mine. I think society has lost a true giant. And right now in this moment, people often ask me if we're ready for the next pandemic. We just as a society are not ready to trust each other. and it's incredibly sad that we've lost somebody that so many of us trust.

28:13STAT colleagues: My name is Casey Ross. I'm the chief investigative reporter for data and technology at STAT. I worked with Helen for about a decade since the very early days of STAT. I actually work remotely. I live in Ohio in kind of a rural enclave and not everybody here knows what STAT is or has followed closely its journalism over the years. And so my neighbors will ask me about what it is I do, and I'll start talking about stat. And inevitably, the topic of COVID will come up. And that's my cue to sort of brag on stat a little bit, and specifically Helen. And I'll say, yeah, well, we were actually the very first outlet to report on this virus emerging from China, because we have the very best infectious disease reporter in the world.

29:02STAT colleagues: And her name is Helen Branswell, and she broke that story. I'll always tell that to my neighbors, as long as I'm working for STAT, because Helen was the leader of our organization in the sense that her reporting really put us on the map and made us the authority that we are. I'll forever be thankful for Helen for doing that and just proud to have been her colleague.

29:30Helen Branswell: My name is Alyssa Ambrose, and I am the director of multimedia at STAT, and I worked with Helen for the last 11 years. When we started working together, I think STAT didn't have a name yet, and we were all working in a small office inside the old Boston Globe headquarters in Dorchester. Helen was one of the first people I met when I got there and what eventually became the STAT newsroom. She was incredibly serious. She didn't really have any ego. She just did the work and she cared about it. And she never overreacted. And you knew if she did react to a story that it was dead serious. She was one of those people that was quietly mentoring a lot of people.

30:17Helen Branswell: She was pretty discreet about it, but she was incredibly supportive. She knew her stuff, and she was really respectful to everyone in the newsroom. Over the years, we'd see headlines about some new antibiotic-resistant bacteria or some virus somewhere. And she'd always say, it's scary, but it's okay. It's probably not as big a deal as other news outlets are making it. But towards the end of December, beginning of January 2020, she started seeing stuff happening out of paper she was reading from China and was starting to get pretty concerned. And I remember I was working on the photo desk. She had started asking me for photos of this city called Wuhan that we had never heard of.

31:06Helen Branswell: And the only photos available were of some road race that had been run in Wuhan like years prior. And she started getting more and more locked in on his story. And all of us knew pretty early that it was going to be a very big deal because Helen did not get serious about things unless it was a big deal. And I think a turning point for a lot of us was when Helen started to work from home probably about a week before the rest of us did. She was concerned about COVID rapidly spreading to the East Coast. And she was right.

31:46Helen Branswell: Looking back, it's wild how correct she was. During that intense period, the first year especially of COVID coverage, Helen worked virtually nonstop, making sure everyone had the information they needed. I think she was always just laser focused on the truth. And sometimes she could be tough, and that was okay because you knew she was right.

32:17Helen Branswell: She probably saved lives, although she'd hate for me to say that because she was really unhappy when we tried to give her all that credit. But I'm sure she saved lives. I personally took her advice with how we were interacting with the world and what kind of medical precautions we were taking. When vaccines started, she was incredibly proactive with explaining how they worked and what was good and what wasn't good. I have to believe that people having that information made a big difference, especially now, especially now since then that we've seen the amount of disinformation that has happened.

32:54Helen Branswell: I mean, if another pandemic pops up and Helen's not there, like, who am I going to ask that I trust as much as her to know what's going on? She probably got me through some of my hardest times, professionally and personally. Every year, on whatever the shortest day of the year was, she would slack me, and I think she did this to a bunch of other people on staff too, and say, hello the sun sets at blah blah blah time today it's the shortest day of the year every day forward will be brighter because she knew that the winter was especially hard she was from Quebec it was cold and dark and she just knew like it would be a good thing to mark that shortest day so that we knew we could just look forward to more sun and she sent that slack to me every year in the 11 years we worked together without fail and I look forward to it every year and it was just a small thing but that's a good example of what Helen was like and I'll miss her

34:10family and public health leaders: we will all miss you Helen thank you for your great work And thank you for joining us to celebrate Helen Branswell's legacy.

34:20Helen Branswell: Our podcast is produced by Rachel Gottbaum. Our senior producer is Alyssa Ambrose. Our executive producer is Rick Burke. And our theme music is by Brian Joel.

34:30STAT colleagues: Tell us what you like about this week's episode, what you didn't like, and share a memory of Helen Branswell. You can do all that by sending us an email at readoutloud at statnews.com.

34:41family and public health leaders: And if you like what we do, leave a review or rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next week.