Helen Branswell, a renowned infectious disease journalist who won the respect of experts and public health officials around the world with her accessible and prescient dispatches on scourges ranging from influenza to polio and from Ebola to Covid-19, becoming a vital source of information for the public in the most chaotic of times, died Tuesday at the age of 69.
The cause was complications from cancer, said his sister, Brenda Branswell.
Branswell, a longtime journalist with the Canadian Press, joined STAT when it was founded in 2015, working at its Boston headquarters before returning to Canada last year to be closer to family in Ottawa.
“Throughout her career, Helen has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to evidence, science and truth, helping the public understand some of the most complex and consequential health challenges of our time,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, wrote in an email. “In an age where misinformation competes with facts, his reporting was a trusted source of clarity, honesty and insight. »
Among the awards Branswell received were the Victor Cohn Award for Excellence in Medical Science Journalism and the George Polk Award for Public Service, citing his “relentless coverage of all aspects of the (Covid) pandemic that has become must-read for the medical community and the general public” — stories that, the judges wrote, were “almost uniformly timely and astute.” She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist with two colleagues for their early Covid stories and received an honorary degree from Carleton University in Ottawa.
Not bad for someone whose career was, as she said in a 2020 interview, “really a fluke.”
Branswell, born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, began freelancing for a small newspaper in eastern Canada after earning a degree in English literature from St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, thinking that writing was one of her skills. She eventually worked for the Canadian Press, covering politics, sports and a little bit of everything else.
Her introduction to the rhythm she would fall in love with happened by chance. She was working in Toronto for the Canadian Press during the SARS outbreak in 2003, and covering viruses and other pathogens felt like a natural fit. She had a news background that many health and science journalists did not have. She also found herself interested in the often complex scientific questions she was studying — like transmission rates and case trajectories — that other breaking news reporters struggled to understand. She became a medical journalist at CP.
“She loved her job,” Brenda Branswell said. “She loved science and medical writing. She thought her work was a gift. She found it so interesting.”
Over the years, at CP and then at STAT, she gained a loyal following for her columns on the twists and turns of the flu, the relentless campaign to eradicate polio and the development of vaccines against a multitude of pathogens. Its pace was inherently unpredictable. With little notice, a new outbreak could go from latent to explosive, or a virus that only a group of experts care about — think Zika — could become a global crisis.
But it was for her forward-thinking ideas on Covid – in the early days of what would become the pandemic and throughout the emergency – that hundreds of thousands of people began turning to her, on STAT’s website and on social media.
Branswell was not an alarmist — she rightly believed that the recent hantavirus outbreak on cruise ships, while serious, did not merit the outsized reaction it seemed to elicit — but she was clear-eyed about the threat that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might pose before scientists had even sequenced it.
“I hope this is nothing out of the ordinary. But a post on @ProMED_mail about ‘unexplained pneumonia’ in China is giving me flashbacks to #SARS,” she tweeted on December 31, 2019. “I don’t like the look of this,” she added a few days later.
Thanks to Branswell’s high-profile media coverage, the New York Times wrote in late March 2020 that STAT “was at the forefront of a story that would dominate the news,” in an article in which a Harvard University expert referred to Branswell as “a godlike figure for infectious disease epidemiologists.”
Throughout the pandemic, she has seen around corners, and her coverage has shown it. She wrote in May 2020 that Covid vaccines were more likely to be strongly protective against serious outcomes than to stop transmission – something the world only understood a year later when faced with this reality. She described in August 2020 how the coming winter “could be Dickensian bleak,” heralding a season in which 3,000 Americans were dying every day from Covid.
“I always found his writings to be very scientifically sound,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and now CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “It was very sophisticated, but accessible and clear.”
When Marrazzo and his team at NIAID were considering which reporter to speak to for one of his first interviews after taking over as director in 2023, Branswell’s name immediately came up. “I trusted her and knew she would ask the right questions.”
Branswell cared deeply that her stories reflect the complexity of the science she wrote about and the sometimes conflicting views that experts put forward on emerging research. She was also a bit obsessive. On Monday afternoon, from the hospital, she shared new data on maternal RSV vaccine uptake in STAT’s Slack.
“A terrible loss for all of us, for everyone who cares about health and medicine,” STAT co-founder and owner John W. Henry wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday. “He was someone we all leaned on for so many years on so many important issues. Beyond that, he was a wonderful person.”
At first glance, Branswell might appear intense, or even, by his own admission, a little gruff. But in reality, there was no greater encouragement for STAT and its staff. She celebrated the stories and recognition from other journalists, although she was quick to remind her colleagues that she despised the answer-any-questions email chains that typically accompanied such successes. While working in Boston, she also frequently brought in treats that she made, whether it was banana bread or – ever the proud Canadian – maple butter tarts.
“She had a big heart and she looked out for people and she did kind things for people, but she did them quietly,” Brenda Branswell said. “She never sought attention or fame for her good deeds.”
Branswell is survived by her five siblings and eight nieces and nephews, of whom she was proud.
From 2010 to 2011, Branswell participated in a Nieman Fellowship in Global Health Reporting at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication. She also served as a CDC Knight in 2004, when she joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for three months.
In the newsroom, if you walked past Branswell’s computer screen, you’d probably see her highlighting and adding notes in the margins to the latest scientific article she was reading. But you might also catch her catching up on the latest brouhaha with the British royal family. (She had visited London with the Canadian Press.)
She also wasn’t above office gossip – seeking out news in the STAT newsroom as well as beyond.
“She always asked the one question that no one else asked, and it happened to be the most important one,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Many of the public health officials Branswell wrote about – sometimes critically – also deeply respected her. Maria Van Kerkhove, a senior WHO official, said Branswell was looking for more than a punchy quote — but rather information that she knew would be useful to the public.
“Helen was someone I spent hours and hours on the phone with over the years,” Van Kerkhove said. “I always wanted to have a conversation with Helen. Whatever the topic, no matter how complex, she always asked the most thoughtful questions and followed it up with an even more thoughtful question.”
“She was also pretty awesome, and no nonsense,” she added.
Indeed, Branswell was not afraid to challenge public health officials about perceived failings. In a memorable interview in April 2020, she asked then-CDC director Robert Redfield why the agency hadn’t held a briefing in a month, as it would have during any other serious outbreak.
“You are invisible now, sir. Your agency is invisible,” Branswell told Redfield.
Other journalists recognized Branswell’s prowess on the beat. As Meg Tirrell, a longtime health reporter now at CNN (and former STAT podcast host), tweeted in April 2021: “When @HelenBranswell is called to the FDA/CDC press #covid19, I literally have a mental image of Babe Ruth heading to home plate.”
Lawrence Altman, a longtime New York Times reporter who covered the health of presidents and political leaders, had never heard of Branswell until a news conference long ago. He said he doesn’t remember the exact occasion, but he remembers being struck by the quality of her questions. After this happened several times, Altman called the Canadian Press and asked to speak…
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