Michael Specter (born 1955) is an American journalist who has been a staff writer, focusing on science, technology, and global public health at The New Yorker since September 1998.

In 1998, he became a roving correspondent based in Rome and covered topics as varied as Europe's demographic crisis, Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà, and the spread of AIDS in Africa.

[1] His original audiobook, Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology and the Future of Life,[2] was published by Pushkin Industries in March 2023.

In it, Specter explores the ways biology — symbolized most recently by the rapid development of the wholly synthetic mRNA vaccines — is essentially become a form of information technology, but instead of using the common bits and bytes of the digital world, it uses an alphabet based on the genetic code of DNA.

He has also written profiles of many people, including Dr. Oz, Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, the ethicist Peter Singer, P. Diddy, Manolo Blahnik, AIDS activist Larry Kramer, and PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk.

Two months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Specter hosted a meeting at the Milken Institute School of Public Health titled "Universal Flu Vaccine" (dated October 29, 2019) with Anthony Fauci and several other government officials.

[6] In this meeting, Specter asked the attendees about the prospect of "disrupting" egg-based flu vaccine production with newer technologies.