Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee on the State of the Pandemic

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2021

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

After a year of battling COVID-19, parts of the United States are celebrating a gradual turn toward normalcy, but the pandemic isn’t over—and it may never be over, exactly. Atul Gawande tells David Remnick that a hard core of vaccine resisters, along with reservoirs of the virus in domestic animals, may make herd immunity elusive. Rather, he says, the correct goal is to bring the impact of COVID-19 down to that of something like the flu. Meanwhile, India is now overwhelmed by a devastating death toll, reported at around four thousand per day but likely much higher. Siddhartha Mukherjee, who reported on the pandemic in developing nations, says that commitments from the West such as extra doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will barely scratch the surface. A national mobilization will be required to even begin to flatten the curve.

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1:10.9	This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick.
1:15.9	Last week, I called up Atul Gawande to talk about COVID in the United States and in India.
1:23.0	My father comes from a village in the state of Maharashtra, which is the hardest hit state so far.
1:29.4	And my mother's from Gujarat, where we also still have family. So I've been in regular
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1:45.3	infections a day, and now it's the other way around. And it is running through entire households
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