Sarah Morgan
I am not a scientist or a clinician. Or a truck driver. There’s very little I can do to help anybody right now, other than follow the rules and stay home. So I am. But something occurred to me this morning.
What I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career.
Okay, no, I can’t really pull off quoting Liam Neeson. But here’s the thing: I’ve worked in pharmaceutical, biotech, and life-sciences public relations, marketing, and communications since I was 19.
What that means is that I’ve spent 23 years getting very good at talking to scientists, clinicians, and executives; understanding the complex information about science, medicine, and technology they want the world to know; and translating it for them into common English for other healthcare professionals, reporters, investors, patients, and the public.
What this further means is that I’ve spent those 23 years becoming very good at figuring out who I trust to give me that information. And so, that’s what occurred to me: I could help that way.
There are plenty of things I’m not good at. Please never hire me to cook you a six-course dinner. But I write and ghostwrite for a lot of extraordinarily brilliant and highly respected people. So trust their opinions: they pay me to be very good at what I do.
I’ve created a Twitter list called COVID-19 Trusted Sources that gathers the tweets of institutions, individuals, and publications I trust implicitly.
That link takes you to their collected wisdom. I’ve followed many of them for more than a decade. If they are sharing information, it can be trusted. It will be accurate, it will be honest, it will be clear. I hope you find it helpful. Please feel free to use it and to share it.
I follow many more people than this on Twitter, obviously, and trust many of them very much, but this is my “greatest hits” of the most useful for the most people without being overwhelming or too much “inside baseball”. Here’s the list in detail (I may update it) so you can see who the accounts are and (where I thought it might be helpful) why I chose them:
- Endpoints News: https://endpts.com
- Stat News: https://www.statnews.com
- The World Health Organization (WHO): https://twitter.com/who
- The Centers for Disease Control (CDC): https://twitter.com/CDCgov
- The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS): https://twitter.com/HHSGov
- Harvard Public Health: https://twitter.com/HarvardChanSPH
- The Gates Foundation: https://twitter.com/GatesFoundation
- Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO https://twitter.com/DrTedros
- Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA): https://twitter.com/DrWoodcockFDA
- Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the FDA, 2017-2019: https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD
- Dr. Kevin Pho, 2004 founder of KevinMD, a site for healthcare professionals collecting their stories and opinions: https://twitter.com/kevinmd
- Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org: https://twitter.com/EricTopol
- Michelle Fay Cortez, health/science/med tech reporter for Bloomberg News: https://twitter.com/FayCortez
- Meg Tirrell, biotech/pharma reporter for CNBC: https://twitter.com/megtirrell
- Peter Loftus, drug/device/healthcare reporter for WSJ: https://twitter.com/Loftus
- Matt Herper, reporter for Stat News: https://twitter.com/matthewherper
- Helen Branswell, senior writer, infectious diseases, Stat News: https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell
- Adam Feuerstein, senior writer for Stat News: https://twitter.com/adamfeuerstein
- Damian Garde, biotech reporter for Stat News: https://twitter.com/damiangarde
- Antonio Regalado, biotech reporter, MIT Technology Review: https://twitter.com/antonioregalado
- The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): https://twitter.com/JAMA_current
- The British Medical Journal (BMJ): https://twitter.com/bmj_latest
- The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): https://twitter.com/NEJM
- The Lancet: https://twitter.com/TheLancet
