Trust in government is key to beating coronavirus. That trust has long been unraveling

Minutes before I’m due to give her a call at her Brooklyn home, Laurie Garrett, the author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust and by far journalism’s most celebrated writer and reporter on epidemics, pandemics and government readiness, sends me a one-word email: “Waiting.”

If she sounds like she’s on deadline, that’s because she is. The only writer ever to win all three of the Big “Ps” of journalism, the Peabody Award in Broadcasting (1977), the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism (1996), and the Polk Award for Foreign Reporting (1997, 2000), Garrett is at the epicenter of the story she’s been researching her entire career: a global pandemic that could claim between 100,00 and 240,000 U.S lives and has already forced much of the world, including her beloved New York City, into lockdown.