It's Wednesday, July 15th. I'm Keela Hughes.

And I'm Gideon Ressick and this is what the day wishing you a happy summer tax day.

Yeah, and if you forgot, that's fair. We don't usually do it this time.

There are some other things going on too. It's okay.

On today's show, we talked to science journalists Ed Yong about the pandemic,

then some headlines.

All right. So yesterday we talked about how the White House has been seeking to

public undermine Dr. Anthony Fauci. They got op-eds, bad political cartoons. We're living in the

dumbest timeline. Meanwhile, Fauci continues to serve on the coronavirus task force and has

continued to attend meetings at the White House, including one on Monday in the West Wing with

Trump's chief of staff. Yeah. And on Tuesday, there was new reporting that the

Trump administration is now asking hospitals to send data on COVID-19 patients directly to them

at the health department and not the CDC, the country's leading infectious diseases agency,

raising some concerns that there could be efforts to misuse the information for political purposes

or withhold it. So we'll likely get into that a little bit more later down the road.

But these are just two examples in the past two days that fit into a bigger story about the United

States failure to deal with the pandemic and the pressures facing public health officials at

every level who are working to fight it. Now, several months in with budgets and departments that

were under-resourced to begin with, it's a topic that Ed Young, science writer at The Atlantic

has been reporting on as well. We talked to Ed back in April about the virus, so we thought it

would be a good time to check in with him again. His latest story is called the pandemic experts are

not okay. Ed, thank you so much for coming back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always a

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