Pandemics expert: We need leadership, creative thinking, and government accountability as coronavirus spreads

Laurie Garrett (Merrill '75, biology) was in China during the SARS epidemic, and won a Pulitzer Prize for chronicling the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire. So she speaks with authority and experience when she says that the coronavirus is “different from anything we have ever seen before.”

Garrett is a leading expert on global health, with a particular focus on newly emerging and reemerging diseases and their effects on foreign policy and national security. She has been watching the coronavirus outbreak closely and speaking with news media including MSNBC to impart knowledge and combat the spread of misinformation.