It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, April 10th.

Some scientific scenarios tell you that something can happen, but they can't say whether it'll

happen in an hour or maybe in 25

years. Well, with us now is the Pulitzer, Peabody, and Polk Prize-winning science journalist,

Lori Garrett. It was in 1994 that she published a book called The Coming Plague, Newly Emerging

Diseases in a World Out of Balance.

And yes, she was on this show for the book shortly after it came out.

25 years later, we got COVID-19.

Now, Lori Garrett has a cover story in the May issue of the New Republic about how President

Trump and Xi Jinping set the stage together for the coronavirus pandemic.

Hi, Lori. Thanks for coming back on with us.

Hi, Brian. It's a sad joy to be on your show.

Simply put, your thesis is that Xi Jinping and Donald Trump acted in very similar authoritarian-style ways, allowing the

virus to take root more than it had to. So let's start with Xi Jinping. As you described,

he initially tried to repress news of the true danger in his country. Can you take us back to

the beginning of that and explain how?

What we know is that the virus first emerged sometime in November in Wuhan, that there were cases of spread of the strange new pneumonia throughout Wuhan all through the month of

December, that there were physicians and lab technicians doing analysis

who said this looks a lot like SARS. The symptoms are similar to SARS, which of course

China went through in 2003 and covered up when it started in 2002. And they could see that in lab analysis, it looked a little like the SARS virus.

And so there was already a percolating sense of concern and fear among health care workers,

which came to a head on December 30th when one particular physician, Li Wenliang,

...