Atul Gawande on the COVID Vaccine, and Daniel Kaluuya on “Judas and the Black Messiah”

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

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Atul Gawande, the staff writer and public-health expert, talks with David Remnick about the progress of the vaccine rollout, the new strains of the coronavirus, and whether we will ever take our masks off. And the actor Daniel Kaluuya talks about playing a man many regard as a martyr, in the new film “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Kaluuya stars as Fred Hampton, a young leader in the Black Panther Party, who was shot in his bed by Chicago police in a predawn raid. The actor talked with Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s “The United States of Anxiety,” about how the F.B.I. and many whites saw Hampton’s affirmation of Black people as tantamount to terrorism.

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.
0:10.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Biden administration has spent much of its first month in office focusing on how to tame the pandemic.
0:20.0	But much of the news is still pretty grim. The vaccine
0:22.5	rollout continues to be chaotic and it's plagued by inequities of all kinds. And no less
0:28.6	important, new variants, mutations of the virus are circulating in the world and we have yet to get a
0:34.9	handle on how to deal with them. Atul Gawanda is a surgeon and a public health expert.
0:40.6	And recently, he served on the COVID task force of the Biden transition team, which was
0:45.4	disbanded just after the president was sworn in.
0:48.4	He's been a staff writer for the New Yorker for many years.
0:51.5	Atul, we had the first doses in the United States administered just over a
0:55.7	couple of months ago. How is that rollout going? The vaccine rollout, so, you know,
1:01.6	at the very beginning, it seemed like we were all breakthrough and no follow-through. We hit
1:06.5	1.7 million vaccines a day. Basically, the capacity to deliver vaccination has been rising steadily.
1:15.7	And around the 26th, we'll have the presentation of the Johnson and Johnson data on their
1:21.9	vaccine to the FDA, which could mean, I think it's likely we'll see an approval within a week after that
1:29.2	and a whole new supply chain coming. So where we are on vaccine delivery is in the top five
1:36.3	in the world. So I consider us to be starting to turn the corner here. I guess what's so disturbing
1:42.8	to me and unnerving is the amount of resistance that we
1:46.9	see to vaccines. We have some populations who are very suspicious of government, and for good reason
1:53.7	historically. We have the anti-vaxxer movement, which has its doubts, whether either through
2:00.0	conspiracy theory or doubts about the science,
2:03.7	we have all kinds of populations and millions of people, if you added up, who are resistant.
	...

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