Good Samaritans vs. Covid-19
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.8 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rev. Franklin Graham, president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse and son of the late evangelical leader Billy Graham, joins Howard Husock to discuss his organization's response to the coronavirus pandemic, the volunteers behind these efforts, and how secular Americans can better understand faith-inspired philanthropic work.
In New York City's Central Park, Graham's disaster-relief organization set up a field hospital to treat patients overflowing from nearby Mount Sinai Hospital. Since the facility opened, its medical teams have treated more than 100 patients. Graham notes that he’s following in his grandfather’s footsteps, providing medical help not only in New York but also in China, where Samaritan’s Purse has donated supplies and personal protective equipment. "American civil society," writes Husock, "diverse and self-organized, still responds to need."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to 10 blocks, the podcast of City Journal. |
| 0:19.8 | I'm Howard Hughesick, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute |
| 0:22.6 | and the director of the Institute's Tocqueville Civil Society Project. I'm joined today by the Reverend |
| 0:28.6 | Franklin Graham, who heads the International Relief Organization Samaritan's Purse. It's built and operates a 68-bed |
| 0:36.1 | field hospital in New York's Central Park to help the city's |
| 0:39.7 | Mount Sinai Hospital cope with the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 0:44.0 | Samaritan's Purse is the volunteer-based Christian relief organization, which has responded |
| 0:48.9 | to health crises all over the world, including the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa, but never before in the |
| 0:57.0 | United States. |
| 0:58.0 | Reverend Glam, thank you so much for joining us. |
| 1:01.0 | Thank you for inviting me. |
| 1:04.0 | You know, many New Yorkers, I think, were surprised that a Christian Relief organization |
| 1:10.0 | could mount a field hospital so quickly in Central Park. |
| 1:14.3 | How did this come to happen? |
| 1:17.2 | Well, it was a, first of all, let me just say that we have these field hospitals, we keep them in stock, |
| 1:26.0 | and our staff train on them so that when |
| 1:30.6 | there is a crisis we can deploy it and normally have it set up within 48 |
| 1:34.9 | hours and be running Central Park had a few challenges so it took us a couple |
| 1:39.7 | extra days to do that but it's it's just what we do and so we work on this. We plan it. We rehearse it. |
| 1:46.1 | We train on it. And so there's all, and they started back during Hurricane Katrina when it hit the |
| 1:53.6 | Gulf Coast. I remember going through one of the cities, I don't know where it was. I think it was |
| 1:59.5 | Mississippi. And there was a field hospital because the local hospital had been destroyed. |
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