If enacted, the funding cuts may cause the WHO to go bankrupt in the middle of a pandemic. Trump’s move also signals the US is no longer prepared to provide a leadership role in global health issues.
For science communicators to be effective, best practice principles need to be applied to the design of messages, the choice of who conveys those messages, and their tone and timing.
Researchers, scientific journals and health agencies are doing everything they can to speed up coronavirus research. The combination of pace and panic during this pandemic is causing mistakes.
Emmanuel Véron, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) and Emmanuel Lincot, Institut catholique de Paris (ICP)
China is seeking to present itself as a model in the fight against the coronavirus – even if it means rewriting the history of the crisis and discrediting the governance of liberal democracies.
Facebook, Google and Twitter are stepping up to block misinformation and promote accurate information about the coronavirus. Their track records on self-policing are poor. The results so far are mixed.
Reactions in South Africa give little reason for hope that the virus will bring people closer together or trigger more energetic action against poverty.
There is no evidence that the coronavirus has evolved into a deadlier strain. It is almost certainly less lethal than initially reported, but that might mean there are more cases than we realised.
From the neighborhood to the newsroom to the White House, nobody stays silent during a health emergency. These terms are often mixed up, and it matters who is using them and when.
The federal government has activated its emergency response plan to deal with a spread of the coronavirus locally, in anticipation of it becoming a “pandemic”.
Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures; former Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau