Atul Gawande on Taming the Coronavirus

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Can a vaccine be distributed fairly? What will be the impact if a large number of people don’t take it—as they say they won’t? Atul Gawande, a New Yorker staff writer who was recently appointed to President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 task force, walks David Remnick through some of the challenges of this pivotal moment. F.D.A. approval of at least one vaccine is expected imminently, but hospitalizations are still rising rapidly around the country, and Gawande is concerned that news of an approval could lead to more irresponsible behavior. “If, once people start getting vaccinated, they start throwing the masks away and you can’t get them to do social distancing,” he said, “then you’re really relying on vaccination as the sole prong of the strategy.” More than forty per cent of people polled say that they are reluctant to take the new vaccines, but Gawande suspects that the real number of resisters may be much smaller. “Part of the reason it’s good that health-care workers would go first is [that] . . . health-care workers are everywhere. Which means we’re all going to know people who got vaccinated, and we’re going to see that they did all right.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.2	This is a grave moment in our history.
0:16.3	We have just reached a point in America when COVID-19 exacts a toll like a daily 9-11, nearly 3,000 deaths a day.
0:25.1	We live now in a strange and liminal state. On the one hand, a vaccine is around the corner. It really is coming.
0:33.7	But we're nowhere near containing this pandemic, Nowhere near the end of the tragedy.
0:39.4	None of us wants to hear it much, but this will be the worst of winters.
0:43.8	Atoll Gawanda is a surgeon and a staff writer for the New Yorker,
0:47.0	and he was just appointed to President-elect Biden's COVID-19 task force.
0:51.6	We talked last week about the shape of the months to come. When this began, I read
0:57.8	the book about 1918 by John Barry, a terrific book, a history of the horrendous flu that killed
1:04.5	millions worldwide and many hundreds of thousands in the United States. And there was all kinds of evidence there about the number
1:11.9	of parades and public gatherings that people had heedless of all kinds of public warnings.
1:16.1	And I thought to myself, well, it's not possible that we would repeat these mistakes again,
1:21.9	because after all, we learned from history, even if the President of the United States does not.
1:26.4	And yet, and yet, how is it possible that we made these mistakes on such a mass scale?
1:32.2	Do you lay at all at the feet of the President of the United States?
1:36.6	I think there's a big part of this that I lay at the feet of the President.
1:41.9	Imagine Pearl Harbor happened, And there was an attack that
1:47.3	hit, you know, one part of the country. And then we spent seven or eight months deciding whether we
1:53.9	were or not going to fight back. The problems to solve here are really clear. The hospitals learned how to bring people to work and have
2:04.7	them succeed. And it was a formula that included masks, included some basic hygiene, some basic
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