A respected science communicator, Jessica's work existed almost entirely behind the scenes—that was the status quo until the COVID-19 pandemic. As an epidemiologist, she was tracking the spread of the virus in its earliest days and, when her broader community turned to her for answers on how to stay safe, she became a trusted go-to. But responding to a few FAQs spiraled into something much bigger.

In a matter of weeks, Malaty Rivera’s social following began to grow rapidly—she went from a private Instagram poster to a forward-facing expert, celebrities platformed her content, and the numbers climbed. Soon, she was invited to join the COVID-19 tracking project as a Science Communication Lead, as well.

For many, Malaty Rivera became a household name and a source of comfort during a vulnerable time, but the impact of her work extends beyond the moment. “I have heard of at least a hundred people who have pivoted their careers to public health because of the work that I did,” she says. “I thought I was going to help people not panic, feel confident about their decision to get a vaccine, and all those things that just needed a little bit of a human touch. But to see people changing their lives and pivoting to do this work is just mind-blowing.”

Today, at a time when some public health leaders sow confusion and mistrust, Malaty Rivera stands firm in the work of calling out mis- and disinformation. She’s also in the process of earning her Doctorate—even if reluctantly so (more on that ahead). The one place you’ll likely never find her working? In government. “I care too much about my ability to be publicly critical of the government to work for it,” she says. 

I had taken a Health and Human Rights class my senior year of college, and it really made me want to lean into the global aspect of disease and harm reduction. So, in 2005, right after I graduated, I moved to Washington, DC, and worked at a nonprofit that was at the intersection of all those topics. I did that for a few years and traveled to 17 countries in three years. It was just a dream job for a kid fresh out of college. 

Then I got recruited by Georgetown University to join a research initiative called Project Argus. That's really where I got the bug. The work was essentially trying to identify early indicators of emerging infectious disease outbreaks and doing literal translation of open-source media from different languages into English, but also simplifying the complex science into accessible, easy-to-understand content for a mostly lay audience. And because I speak a few languages, I came in as an Arabic and Spanish translator. For example, in 2009, we started seeing pigs and farmers getting sick, and a shortage of ventilators. Those were all clues that the 2009 H1N1 or Swine Flu pandemic was emerging. It was kind of like disease detective work, and it was just riveting. 

On the day-to-day, [health communication] wasn't public-facing. It was mostly for the federal government. We wanted to know: Are humans at risk? Are animals at risk? Are our plant species at risk? After I did that for a few years, I moved to New York with my husband and pivoted to healthcare PR, where I had my time in the big Omnicom conglomerate world working for biotech companies. If they had any clinical milestones, I could turn their reporting into a social media post, or a leave-behind for a doctor's office, or a blog post for their patient advocacy group. I did all kinds of content, but it was really from behind the scenes.

Because of my background, I am subscribed to a bunch of very nerdy things, like a resource that gives you alerts to emerging public health issues. So in December of 2019, I got a ProMED alert that said “undiagnosed pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan.” My colleagues and I were all keeping a close eye on it, but then, when the headlines started to brew in January and February, people who knew my background started blowing up my phone. 

I made my private Instagram account public in February of 2020 and started doing some FAQs on my stories, saving them as highlights. I had about 900 followers at the time. It's hard to even understand what happened next, but Sophia Bush was actually a big part of it. Sophia and I know each other from LA, and she also attended USC. Even though we weren't friends in college, she reached out and said, “Hey, can we do an Instagram live where we can just ask a bunch of these questions in real time?” That was the catalyst. My followers turned into an extremely captive audience with more demands for content than I could have ever imagined.

I have always believed that science is unfinished until it's communicated and people are aware of the headlines. During the pandemic, people didn't understand who was trustworthy, what was reliable, what was a conspiracy, what was even racist or xenophobic tropes. 

You don't join public health or enter the public health workforce for glamour. It is an altruistic type of career because you're thinking about reducing harm, and a lot of it is invisible and thankless. I thought it was a great opportunity to show people how they can be involved in the invisible work, keep each other safe, flatten the curve, and bring people into the work that we were doing. Because it doesn't work unless we're all doing it. 

In the era of social media, you can create a facade of expertise just by having a large following or a lot of money, and that can create a brand or a platform that looks extremely believable. It makes it difficult for folks to understand who to trust, and so it’s not a shock that trust is at an all-time low.

Being loud and online—especially as a woman challenging white men in positions of power—is challenging the status quo, and it gets me in a lot of trouble for sure. I get death threats all the time, but I'm not going to stop because we have nothing if we don't have trust. Trust is the currency that keeps everything going. There are social contracts that we've all signed, whether we like it or not, to make choices to protect each other. And we're starting to see that all unravel. So I'm trying to bring back the social contract, one person at a time, through social media content.

Throughout the pandemic, I was excluded from a number of things that I could do because I didn't have a terminal degree, although I had 10 to 15 years of experience on some of the people who were getting tapped for these special groups at NASEM [National Academy of Science] and phone calls with the White House. They only wanted people who were doctors and had doctorates.

Right now, I'm halfway through my doctorate program, and I’m partly doing it to get this chip off my shoulder. But after, I fully intend on writing an op-ed because this is patriarchy at work. Telling a woman that, because she chose to get industry experience, not go into debt, and make a livable wage that afforded her a mortgage for her three children, with her husband, that she is somehow considered less qualified without a terminal degree, shows how archaic and patriarchal academia and the sciences can be. 

I've always been a fashion nerd. I've loved dressing up and accessorizing. (I mean, I have 17 earrings in my ears.) But, as a woman of color, I've been very sensitive to how I dress, as well. 

Years ago, I had a really unfortunate experience at a company where I worked. I used to wear my hair down and curly all the time, and I remember the day before a big client pitch, a managing director at the company said, “Okay, so we are all going to wear suits.” And she looked at me and said, “If you want to go get a blowout, you can put it on the expense account.” Curly hair was not cool growing up. People called my hair “pubes,” and I was bullied. So, to be in my 30s and be told my hair is not professional and not how to show up to a client meeting really stuck with me. I always think about all the ways I’m presenting myself from head to toe and how professionalism is so subjective. It's been white coded for so long in America, where textured hair or “flashy” accessories are considered unprofessional.

As a mom, I'm also always thinking about how my kids look. I would never want them to feel that their natural state—whether it's their hair or their skin tone—would need to be more white passing. But that's always on my mind: how I show up and how I will be compared to a white person in the same role. 

Science communication is regularly an afterthought, even during the pandemic. We spent billions to create the vaccines for Operation Warp Speed. We spent $0 on comms planning to go in tandem with it. A vaccine in a vial does not save a life. A vaccination does. And a vaccine turns into a vaccination through a trusted message. 

I want to remind folks that without science communication, science is just going to sit in vials, in laboratories, in academic peer-reviewed journals that nobody outside the industry cares to read. And so increasing people's literacy of media science data is the best tool we can give them.

Even as a mom, I want my kids to be better consumers of digital content. In the era of AI, and mis- and disinformation, I want people to understand the idea of infodemics as much as they understand the concept of checking the weather—so that people don't get led astray. Because I don't think people who make bad choices or who believe in misinformation are all inherently sinister or bad. A lot of times, they're parents who are just trying to make informed choices for their kids, and they just get sucked in by very predatory people.