N ot a m e m b e r ? J o i n at a s so c iate d h a i rp rofe s sio n a ls .c o m 35
Whatever your response, you'd be right. In the
course of an average day since the pandemic began,
dozens of such headlines have crossed all our
screens, mostly speculative pieces on what might
or might not be happening to our world with varying
degrees of accuracy.
Let's face it: this is possibly the single most impactful major event
in our lifetimes, and it's hard not to get caught up in a desperate search
for information on the science behind the situation. As epidemiologists,
infectious disease specialists, and all manner of experts take to the
airwaves to advise, admonish, and inform us, a lot of contradictory
information is flying around. Official-looking titles and well-crafted
articles selling either hope or fear can suck us in quite easily, but
after an hour or so of scrolling and clicking in the hope of making
sense of it all, we can end up more confused than when we started.
To cut through the noise, it would make sense to go straight to the
research itself. Following World Health Organization (WHO) policy put
in place following lessons learned from the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak,
scientific publishers worldwide agreed to make all research and data on
public health emergencies freely available, so that all scientists could
access information and pool resources and efforts toward developing
a vaccine and/or curative drugs.
1
This has been applied to the current
COVID-19 crisis. Reflecting the speed of virus spread, they also
By Sasha Chaitow, PhD
