Past Webinars: Learn from Health & Policy Experts

Please note that all webinars are on-the-record, so journalists are free to use quotes or video clips compiled below in their stories. To register for upcoming webinars, please go here.

 

Tips for Reporting on Migration During the Pandemic

COVID-19 has resulted in devastating economic and health consequences for many people around the world — and especially the most vulnerable.

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Key Quotes: Understanding How COVID-19 Vaccines Work

A year after COVID-19 was declared a national emergency, vaccines have finally arrived, with the U.S. averaging 2 million vaccine doses administered per day. But the arrival of vaccines also brings an explosion of information — some of it untrue. Dr. Galit Alter, a professor of medicine and a group leader at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, spoke with Patrick Butler, ICFJ’s Vice President of Content and Community, about vaccines.

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Equity in Vaccine Access and Distribution: Key Takeaways

As countries around the world roll out COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, equitable access to the vaccines is an issue front and center.

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Lessons for reporting on COVID-19 variants

As governments around the world roll out COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, new strains of the virus have fueled growing concerns among experts.

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Webinar 56: COVID-19 in 2021: What Can We Expect?

A Q&A with Prof. Gabriel Leung, an infectious disease epidemiologist and dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Moderated by ICFJ Director of Community Engagement Stella Roque. 

The pandemic continues to plague countries around the world, with some more successful than others in containing the spread of the virus. Today, we are seeing second-wave infections spread across Europe as scientists are still racing to develop a vaccine. What is the outlook for 2021? Where should journalists be ready to set their sights this upcoming year as the pandemic develops? We speak with Prof. Gabriel Leung, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the University of Hong Kong to get his analysis as to how the pandemic is likely to develop in the upcoming year and what we should be ready for.

 

 

 

Key Quotes: Combating COVID-19 in Germany

As COVID-19 spread across Europe, countries like France, Italy, Spain and the U.K. faced high rates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus. Germany, meanwhile, eluded similar levels of transmission and suffering among its citizens.

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How Taiwan Rewrote Its Pandemic Playbook and Kept its COVID-19 Cases Below 500

The chief of Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control credited the centralized response to contagious diseases that the island democracy developed in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak with containing the spread of the novel coronavirus this year to fewer than 500 people in its population of nearly 24 million. 

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Key Quotes: Six Months Later — Results of the Evolving COVID-19 Public Health Response

Six months into the pandemic, countries around the world have had different types of public health responses to COVID-19. How have those responses evolved? Why have some countries been more successful than others at halting the spread of the virus? We bring back Dr. Claire Standley, Ph.D., Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security, to give us her analysis of how these responses have evolved and why some have been more successful than others when there is no “one size fits all” solution.

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Key Quotes: Six Months After the First COVID-19 Outbreak, What Do We Know About the Virus?

During the pandemic, research has pointed to the likelihood that aerosols—made up of tiny droplets of water even smaller than those from a cough—may carry SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Because aerosols can linger in the air in enclosed spaces, this research has important implications for prevention. But until July 7, the World Health Organization had declined to acknowledge that aerosol-borne particles could transmit the virus.

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News and Mental Health: What Journalists Should Know

The physical toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is widely known, but what is the toll on mental health -- and how can journalists better cover it?

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If the U.S. Isn’t Prepared for Safely Reopening for Business, What Does it Say About the Global South?

As many communities move from urging people to stay at home to opening for business, the U.S., one of the world’s wealthiest countries, is not prepared to meet the challenge, an economist and an epidemiologist said during an ICFJ webinar Thursday. “When the United States is handling this relatively poorly, you look at other countries that are less affluent than we are, and definitely have concern for them,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University.

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Sweden’s Top Epidemiologist Challenges Conventional Wisdom on COVID-19

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist challenged a wide array of public health practices — from wearing masks in public to keeping young children home from school — that countries are using in the fight against COVID-19, in an interview with ICFJ Friday, May 11.

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The Race to Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine With Dr. Lynda Stuart

Dr. Lynda Stuart, a leading vaccine expert at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said she is optimistic that a COVID-19 vaccine could be available as soon as 14 months from now. At that time, the vaccine would likely go to healthcare workers, the elderly and people who are considered most vulnerable.

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The Origin of COVID-19 and Self-Protection Measures With Virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen

A noted virologist who has investigated threats from Ebola to SARS cautioned journalists to be wary of sources who pretend to be experts on COVID-19 since the disease was unknown to the world just a few months ago.

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Problematic Linkages Between COVID-19 and Migration With Sarah Pierce and Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan

In the race to slow COVID-19, governments around the globe took aim at migration policies to keep the virus from crossing international borders, when the disease was clustered in just a handful of countries. Border closures, travel restrictions, and prohibitions on arrivals from certain areas were among leading policy responses in the early days to keep this from becoming a full-blown global pandemic. But, can they work in today’s globalized world?

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Are our Public Health Systems Prepared for COVID-19? A Talk With Dr. Claire Standley

Dr. Standley discussed the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health systems around the world and who's prepared, who's not, and who's doing the best job of responding. What have various countries failed to do in advance that they need to implement in the future to prevent pandemics like this one? What is this pandemic teaching us about preparedness?

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How is COVID-19 Affecting Children? Join our Q&A with Dr. Karen Kotloff

In our webinar series in the ICFJ Global Health Crisis Reporting Forum, we talked with Dr. Karen Kotloff, head of the Division of Infectious Disease and Tropical Pediatrics at the University of Maryland. She also is the Associate Director of Clinical Studies at the university’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health and has worked extensively in Africa. The online talk was moderated by ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan.

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Lessons Learned from the Ebola Epidemic: What We Can Do Now in Response to COVID-19, with Dr. Samba Sow

In our inaugural webinar held by the ICFJ Global Health Crisis Reporting Forum we heard from Dr. Samba Sow, one of six of the World Health Organization's special envoys on COVID-19. Dr. Sow is director general of the internationally recognized Center for Vaccine Development-Mali. The online talk was moderated by ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan.

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