What Reporting on Long COVID Taught Me
Featuring Ed Yong

Ed Yong first started reporting on long COVID in June 2020, before the condition was widely recognized by the medical community.

In this talk, he'll share how he approached his coverage, what he learned, why it mattered, and how this work changed him--his understanding of complex chronic illnesses, his attitudes to journalism, and his hopes for what his field can achieve.

For his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism; the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Benton Award for distinguished public service; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical science reporting, the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. He was also a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in public service, and was described as “the most important and impactful journalist of 2020” by Poynter.

After his keynote, Ed will also be facilitating a roundtable dialogue bringing together representatives from the local Long COVID patient and caregiver community, BC’s public health professionals, and researchers. 

In-person seating is limited with extensive COVID-19 precautions (including mandatory masking, self-testing negative, and a venue hosting MERV-13 filters), and the event will be livestreamed for global viewing (with ASL interpretation available).

Event Details

Date: Thursday, April 4

Time: 7:00 pm

Online Location: Webinar
*ASL services will be provided for webinar attendees

Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist, a Pulitzer winner, and the author of two bestselling books.  

He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: AN IMMENSE WORLD, about the extraordinary sensory worlds of other animals; and I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, about the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. An Immense World won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize; it was also a finalist for four other major awards, and was ranked as one of the top books of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Economist, People, Barack Obama, and more than 30 other lists. 

Ed was a staff writer at the Atlantic from 2015 to 2023. Prior to that, his writing also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and other publications. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021. 

Ed cares deeply about empathetic, accurate, nuanced, and curiosity-driven reporting. Through his journalism, he tries to not only describe what is happening but also help people make sense of it, to bear witness to suffering, to speak truth to power, to reveal wonder in the obscure, and to push for a more just and equitable world. He has written about the origin of life itself and the modern-day extinction crisis; the way science is conducted and the scientists who are fighting to make it more reliable and inclusive; the people who are still suffering from the the long-lasting consequences of viral infections and the societal forces that said infections reveal and exploit; and the invisible microbes that profoundly shape our lives and the imperceptible information that other animals can detect with their amazing senses.