Lawrence Wright on How the Pandemic Response Went So Wrong
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
The first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine mark what we hope will be the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. The speed of vaccine development has been truly unprecedented, but this breakthrough is taking place at a moment when the U.S. death toll has also reached a new peak—over three thousand per day. How was the response to such a clear danger mismanaged so tragically? The New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright—who has reported on Al Qaeda and the Church of Scientology—has followed the story of the pandemic unfolding in the United States since the first lockdowns in March. Wright walks David Remnick through key moments of decision-making in the Trump White House: from the response to the first reports of a virus to botched mask mandates and testing rollouts, up through the emergency-use authorization of the vaccine. The Trump Administration bears much responsibility for the bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, but Wright also finds ample evidence of larger, systemic breakdown. “The magnitude of our failure,” he tells David Remnick, “is unparalleled.”
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| 0:47.8 | I'm Dorothy Wickendid. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks with |
| 0:53.0 | New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright. In a new |
| 0:56.1 | piece for the magazine, Wright describes in detail the U.S. government's response to the coronavirus |
| 1:01.5 | pandemic and the failings that led to the loss of more than 350,000 Americans. |
| 1:10.4 | 2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic, the catastrophe of COVID-19. |
| 1:16.9 | There were overwhelmed hospitals, shuttered businesses, upended livelihoods, millions of sick |
| 1:23.0 | people, and a staggering death toll. And though vaccines have arrived with incredible speed, |
| 1:29.8 | we still have a very long way to go before this ends. |
| 1:33.1 | It's an agonizing question to ask, |
| 1:35.2 | while we are still in the midst of this, |
| 1:37.0 | but we have to ask it. |
| 1:38.7 | Could this year have been different? |
| 1:40.8 | How many lives could have been saved had the federal government, |
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