Announcement from National Editor Matea Gold, Deputy National Editor Philip Rucker and Health and Science Editor Stephen Smith:
We are delighted to announce that Lauren Weber, an accomplished health journalist, is joining the Health and Science team as an accountability reporter focused on disinformation.
Lauren will examine the forces promoting scientific and medical disinformation on subjects such as vaccines, drugs, nutritional supplements and health-care treatments, and will chronicle how academia, the health-care industry and government agencies fail to hold responsible those who profit from false claims. This is a newly created position that is part of The Post’s expanded commitment to health and science reporting.
Lauren has spent the past three years as Midwest correspondent for Kaiser Health News based in her hometown of St. Louis. During that time, she has written memorably about decimated public health systems, the war on health officials during the coronavirus pandemic and Trump administration figures joining air-cleaning companies that promote controversial technologies. Her work on a series called “Underfunded and Under Threat” – a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press that revealed broad efforts by state legislatures to curb public health powers – won the ONA University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism, Large Newsroom and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award. Previously, Lauren worked as a health policy...
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