Helen Branswell, a renowned infectious disease reporter who earned the respect of experts and public health officials around the world with her accessible, prescient dispatches on scourges from influenza to polio and Ebola to Covid-19, becoming a vital source of information for the public during the most chaotic of times, died Tuesday at age 69.
The cause was complications from cancer, said her sister, Brenda Branswell.
Branswell, a longtime reporter at the Canadian Press, joined STAT at its founding in 2015, working out of the Boston headquarters before returning home to Canada last year to be closer to family in Ottawa.
“Throughout her career, Helen 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, the director-general of the World Health Organization, wrote in an email. “At a moment when misinformation competes with facts, her reporting was a trusted source of clarity, honesty, and insight.”
Among the awards Branswell received were the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting and the George Polk Award for Public Service, which cited her “relentless coverage of all aspects of the [Covid] pandemic that became must reading 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 Ottawa’s Carleton University.
Not bad for someone whose career was, as she put it in a 2020 interview, “really a fluke.”
Branswell, who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, started freelancing for a small newspaper in Eastern Canada after graduating from New Brunswick’s St. Thomas University with a degree in English literature, thinking that writing was one skill she had. She eventually worked her way to the Canadian Press, covering politics, sports, and a bit of everything else.
Her introduction to the beat that she would fall in love with came about by happenstance. She was working in Toronto for the Canadian Press during the city’s 2003 SARS outbreak, and coverage of viruses and other pathogens turned out to be a natural fit. She had a background in breaking news that many health and science journalists didn’t. She also found herself taking to the often complex scientific issues she was learning about — like transmission rates and case trajectories — that other breaking news reporters were struggling to understand. She became a medical reporter at the CP.
“She loved her work,” Brenda Branswell said. “She loved science and medical writing. She thought her job was a gift. She found it so interesting.”
Over the years, at the CP and then at STAT, she gained a loyal following for chronicling the twists and turns of influenza, the grinding campaign to eradicate polio, and the development of vaccines for a host of pathogens. Her beat was inherently unpredictable. With little notice, a new outbreak could go from smoldering to explosive, or a virus only a coterie of experts cared about — think Zika — could become a global crisis.
But it was her ahead-of-the-curve insights 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 for, on STAT’s site and on social media.
Branswell was not alarmist — she rightly thought the recent cruise ship hantavirus outbreak, though serious, didn’t merit the outsized reaction it seemed to be getting — but she was clear-eyed about the threat that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could pose even before scientists had sequenced it.
“Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary. But a @ProMED_mail posting about ‘unexplained pneumonias’ in China is giving me #SARS flashbacks,” she famously tweeted on Dec. 31, 2019. “Not liking the look of this,” she added a few days later.
Thanks to Branswell’s leading coverage, the New York Times wrote in late March 2020 that STAT “was early to a story that would dominate the news,” in an article in which a Harvard University expert referred to Branswell as “a godlike figure to people who are infectious-disease epidemiologists.”
Throughout the pandemic, she saw around corners, and her coverage showed it. She wrote in May 2020 that Covid vaccines were more likely to be strongly protective against severe outcomes than to put a stop to transmission — something the world only caught onto a year later when faced with that reality. She described in August 2020 how the upcoming winter “could be Dickensianly bleak,” previewing a season during which 3,000 Americans a day were dying from Covid.
“I always found her writing just so scientifically sound,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, a former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and now the CEO of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “It was very sophisticated, yet accessible and clear.”
When Marrazzo and her team at NIAID were considering which reporter to speak with for one of her first interviews after taking over as director in 2023, Branswell’s name came up immediately. “I trusted her, and I knew she would ask the right questions.”
Branswell cared deeply about ensuring her stories captured the complexity of the science she was writing about and the sometimes competing viewpoints experts would advance about emerging research. She was also a bit obsessive. On Monday afternoon, from the hospital, she shared in STAT’s Slack new data about uptake of the maternal RSV vaccine.
“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 note to staff on Tuesday. “She was someone we all leaned on for so many years on so many important issues. Beyond that she was a wonderful person.”
At first impression, Branswell could come across as intense, even, by her own admission, a bit gruff. But in fact, there was no bigger cheerleader for STAT and its staff. She celebrated other reporters’ stories and recognition even as she was quick to remind colleagues she despised the reply-all email chains that typically accompanied such successes. When she worked in Boston, she also frequently brought in treats she baked, whether 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 was never seeking any attention or glory for her good deeds.”
Branswell is survived by her five siblings and eight nieces and nephews, whom she proudly doted on.
From 2010 to 2011, Branswell participated in a Nieman Fellowship in Global Health Reporting at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication. She was also a CDC Knight fellow in 2004, when she embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for three months.
In the newsroom, if you walked by Branswell’s computer screen, you’d likely see her highlighting and adding notes in the margins to the latest scientific paper she was reading. But you might also spot her catching up on the latest hubbub with the British royal family. (She had done a stint in London with the Canadian Press.)
She also wasn’t above office gossip — scouring for news within STAT’s newsroom as well as beyond it.
“She always asked the one question nobody else asked, and it just happened to be the most important one,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Many of the public health officials Branswell wrote about — sometimes critically — also deeply respected her. Maria Van Kerkhove, a top WHO official, said Branswell was out for more than a snappy quote — but rather information that she knew would be useful for the public to understand.
“Helen was someone I spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with over the years,” Van Kerkhove said. “I always wanted to have a conversation with Helen. No matter what the topic was, no matter how complex it was, she always asked the most thoughtful questions, and followed up with an even more thoughtful question.”
“She was also pretty kickass, and no nonsense,” she added.
Indeed, Branswell wasn’t afraid to call out public health officials on perceived lapses. In one memorable interview in April 2020, she pressed then-CDC Director Robert Redfield why the agency hadn’t held a briefing in a month, as would have been the case in any other serious disease outbreak.
“You’re invisible now, sir. Your agency is invisible,” Branswell told Redfield.
Other reporters recognized Branswell’s prowess on the beat. As Meg Tirrell, a longtime health reporter now at CNN (and formerly the host of a STAT podcast), tweeted in April 2021, “When @HelenBranswell gets called on in FDA/CDC #covid19 pressers I literally get a mental picture of Babe Ruth striding up 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 some long-ago press briefing. He said he doesn’t remember the exact occasion but he remembers being struck by the quality of her questions. After it happened a few times, Altman called the Canadian Press and asked to speak to Branswell, starting up what became a friendship.
“She was the best reporter on infectious diseases that I know,” Altman said.
In August, Branswell was named as this year’s recipient of the Kovler Prize for Trust in Life Science Journalism, awarded by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, which cited her “exceptional ability to clearly convey complex and often urgent science topics for the public.”
The prize came with a $25,000 honorarium, which Branswell told STAT Executive Editor Rick Berke she wanted to contribute to a fellowship that was named in honor of veteran science journalist Sharon Begley, who died of cancer in 2021 and was a friend of Branswell’s at STAT. The fellowship is intended for early-career U.S. journalists from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in the profession.
Before the work-at-home period of the pandemic, Branswell and Begley sat next to each other in the Boston newsroom, the doyennes of STAT, and of science journalism. Reporters and editors alike regularly sought their advice on how to cover a certain story, the history of a certain therapeutic approach, or just their general wisdom.
As one STAT reporter put it Tuesday, it was a comforting thought that they might be back at their desks together again.