Lawrence Wright on How the Pandemic Response Went So Wrong

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

🗓️ 28 December 2020

⏱️ 31 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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:08.4	I'm David Remnick.
0:10.0	2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic, the catastrophe of COVID-19.
0:16.2	There were overwhelmed hospitals, shuttered businesses, upended livelihoods, millions of sick people, and a staggering
0:24.1	death toll. And though vaccines have arrived with incredible speed, we still have a very long way to go
0:30.7	before this ends. It's an agonizing question to ask while we are still in the midst of this,
0:36.2	but we have to ask it, could this
0:38.5	year have been different? How many lives could have been saved had the federal government,
0:43.0	starting with the president of the United States, acted with greater dispatch, efficiency,
0:48.7	and transparency? The New Yorkers Lawrence Wright set everything aside from the start of the
0:53.8	pandemic to follow
0:54.8	its course and write a definitive account.
0:58.0	He spent seven months talking to government officials inside the White House and the public
1:01.9	health bureaucracies.
1:03.7	He spoke to frontline medical workers who have fought tirelessly through the pandemic,
1:08.6	and to scientists whose breakthroughs against the virus can only be described
1:12.3	as a kind of miracle. His 30,000-word-long article, The Plague Year, was just published at
1:19.2	New Yorker.com, and it offers an expansive portrait of how the pandemic has changed every
1:25.0	aspect of our lives and what mistakes were made along the way.
1:29.2	Larry, hi, how are you?
1:30.9	It's a pleasure to talk to you, David.
1:33.3	So much has been written and said about the pandemic, and there'll be much more to come inevitably.
	...

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