Branswell joined The Canadian Press in 1986, where she served as London correspondent for five years. She switched to medical reporting in 2000, and became well known for her coverage of global health outbreaks. Branswell led the coverage of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Ebola, Avian influenza, Zika, Middle East respiratory syndrome and swine flu pandemics. In 2004 Branswell joined the Centers for Disease Control as a Knight Fellow. In 2011 Branswell was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Here she concentrated on Polio eradication, with a focus on how India is fighting the spread of poliovirus. During an interview with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Branswell provided an overview of her experience on reporting during pandemics. This report included advice on which stories to cover and which not cover, how to identify reliable sources and how to prepare for interviews with researchers. The Canadian Press did not have a large budget and Branswell wrote most of her articles from her office or home. In 2015 Branswell left The Canadian Press to join Stat News. Stat News, a health news website, launched that year. Branswell is a popular science communicator. She is regularly recommended as one of the most important health journalists to follow onTwitter. She was selected as a Harvard Medical School media fellow in 2019.
Coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
Branswell led the Stat News reporting on the coronavirus pandemic. She first started sharing concerns about the emerging outbreak on December 31, 2019. Branswell had read a ProMED-mail posting that described an unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, which concerned her because of its similarities to SARS. Two days later, in early January 2020, Branswell tweeted, “Not liking the look of this”. By January 4 Branswell had written her first article on SARS-CoV-2 for Stat News, predicting that it could be “a new coronavirus”. Branswell used her Twitter feed to discuss recent developments as well as debunking misinformation. She remarked that, for the scientific community, this virus was different to other pandemics, because the rise of preprint serves meant that journalists and the public had access to data and research much faster than before. She covered the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, interviewing the Head of Vaccine research at Sanofi, who estimated that it would take three years before the vaccine was widely available. Sanofi have experience in the development of a SARS vaccination, as well as the ability to do large-scale manufacture, which Branswell believes is crucial to produce vaccinations for people all over the world. She questioned why Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control, was so silent throughout the outbreak, whereas they provided regular briefings during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. She also discussed the pandemic with Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control, asking when the world would be able to reopen, and what percentage of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs from asymptomatic people.
