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A prominent science author and journalist will talk about the challenges COVID-19 posed to health communicators who had to confront mis- and disinformation that undermined the nation's efforts to control the pandemic.

Maryn McKenna, senior writer at WIRED, will headline the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award Lecture on Tuesday, October 24, at 2 p.m. in the Freedom Forum Conference Center (Carroll Hall 305) at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.  McKenna maintains that the COVID-19 pandemic was more than a public health crisis. It was also a communication emergency as activists on social media and elsewhere promoted health conspiracies and untruths that represented threats to public health.

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The lecture — "Too Much and Not Enough: The challenge of conveying trustworthy information" — is sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, and The Kavli Foundation. It is hosted by UNC Hussman in partnership with the Gillings School of Global Public Health.

McKenna is the author of several books including Superbug and more recently, Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats.

She is a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, WIRED, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, NPR, Newsweek, Scientific American, Nature, The Guardian, Eating Well, Eater, and numerous other magazines and sites. As a newspaper reporter, she spent 10 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.