Amid global condemnation that doctors silenced by China could have stopped the spread of the coronavirus, Newsthink’s host and creator Cindy Pom finds out the real reason for China’s cover up. Professor Leigh Jenco, a specialist in Chinese political thought at the London School of Economics, explains Beijing’s actions were not a surprise. Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer who has tracked disease outbreaks including Ebola and SARS, describes the steps Chinese officials took to conceal the crisis.
On January 22, Macau’s first Covid-19 case was confirmed: a 52-year-old woman from Wuhan who had taken the high-speed rail to Zhuhai and crossed into the Chinese special administrative region a few days before.
Macau’s chief executive, Ho Iat-seng, who had been sworn in only a month earlier as the city commemorated the 20-year anniversary of its handover from Portugal, announced the creation of the Novel Coronavirus Response and Coordination Centre, which replaced the Interdepartmental Working Group Against Pneumonia of Unknown Cause he had set up just two weeks earlier, on January 5.
"We now know that Xi Jinping went before the state council, the high governing body of China, and told them in a secret session on January 7 that the issue in Wuhan was so serious that he was personally stepping in and taking control," said Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and author of "The Coming Plague." "The head of state of a nation of more than a billion people doesn't personally intervene in a little outbreak with a half-a-dozen cases. Uh-unh. We now know that the CIA was passing on to the White House, 'Look, there's something potentially catastrophic emerging.'
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”
Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and pandemic expert, said of asylum seekers, “There is no particular reason to single them out. And there is no particular reason to believe that closing the border has any effect whatsoever on the spread of disease. The disease is already here.”
Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter covering global pandemics, tells Lawrence O’Donnell that the White House guidelines for reopening communicated one thing: the federal government is not responsible for managing coronavirus testing; it's up to the states.
A americana Laurie Garrett, analista de políticas mundiais de saúde, é uma especialista em epidemias. Ao longo de sua carreira, ela já investigou mais de 30.
Em 1996, Garrett foi vencedora do Pulitzer de Reportagem Explicativa pela cobertura do surto de Ebola no Zaire pelo jornal Newsday. A reportagem deu origem ao livro Ebola: Story of an Outbreak (Ebola: história de um surto, em tradução livre). Garrett foi também uma das consultoras técnicas do filme “Contágio” (2011).
COVID-19 originated in China and exploded across the US. Today, a look at the leaders of those two countries: What have they done right to contain this pandemic, what have they done wrong, and what haven't they done at all? On today's show, Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer, Peabody, and Polk-prize-winning health and science writer, and author of multiple best-selling books on global health and epidemic diseases, including, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance ( Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994) discusses her cover story from The New Republic’s May issue about how Presidents Trump and Xi set the stage for the coronavirus pandemic.
The only thing you know about the ghastly numbers the grow larger every day on your computer or television screen is that they are wrong. They hugely understate the number of victims of the current pandemic and because we are testing a fraction of a fraction of what we should be, we can't tell how far off we are...or what the real nature of the disease is. The Administration is lying and suppressing data. And the potential for a horrific second wave later in the year is growing. We discuss how we get to the truth and the nature of the real risk we face with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurie Garrett and Ryan Goodman, co-editor of "Just Security" and Professor of Law at NYU Law School. It is essential listening. Don't miss it.
We knew this was coming. In her 1994 warning to the world, The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett concluded: “While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.”
We [the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing] checked in with our prizewinners at the beginning of April and asked what stories had most powerfully affected them. Laurie Garrett featured.
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.
How did it happen? And who’s accountable? Seems now a lot of people saw it coming. Stephen King wrote his viral bestseller The Stand 30 years ago; Bill Gates put his warning in a TED talk; our Pentagon had a plan to counter the pandemic. It was the reporter Laurie Garrett, covering viruses before HIV/AIDS in the ’80s, who got inside 30 different epidemics around the world before this one, and put a title on her scrupulous non-fiction: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. That was 26 years ago. This week she’s just out with a first draft of our coronavirus history, with two plausible villains and also two possible sources of critical help, if it’s not too late.
After two months of refusing to face the true proportions of the coronavirus pandemic head-on, President Donald Trump sought to reassure panicked citizens—and financial markets—in an address to the nation in early March. The president stressed, without any solid evidence, that America had been remarkably successful in containing the spread of the virus, and was making additional headway in streamlining effective and affordable treatment for infected Americans. The main new measure he touted, however, highlighted just how disastrous his administration’s response to the crisis had been since the virus first arrived in the United States back in January: Re-upping America’s prior policy of aggressive border closure, Trump announced that the United States would be suspending entry of travelers from Europe, where the coronavirus was then spreading with alarming speed.
THE PRESS AND THE PANDEMIC - An exclusive interactive workshop for journalists with veteran epidemic reporter Laurie Garrett LIVE Wednesday 1 April on Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, 12 to 2 p.m. US Eastern time (1600 - 1800 UTC)
Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than three decades of pack-leading experience writing prescient and piercing stories on the global threat from emerging infectious disease, from HIV through Ebola to COVID-19 and beyond.
Here, Garrett breaks away briefly from her nonstop writing on a real-time catastrophe for a special conversation with fellow journalists (and some journalism schools) to offer tips on how to avoid consequential mistakes and shape coverage in new ways that can provide more impact. (The event is open to the public but questions from journalists and then journalism students will be taken first.)
安静、空旷，劳丽·加勒特望向窗外，世界第一大城市纽约已经完全没有了昔日的繁华景象，她自己也大幅减少了在外活动的时间，Zoom、Skype等视频电话软件成为新的工作手段。恐慌情绪让商店的货物被抢购一空，但食品供应还算充足。
这位至少写过三本有关传染病著作的纽约客，曾因为在公卫领域的报道而获得普利策奖，此时看起来并不难适应疫情笼罩下的生活。在研究和观察了人类社会的多次传染病流行造成的灾难后，对于新冠疫情给世界带来的变化，她认为，只有9·11恐袭事件可以与之相提并论。
The epidemic begins in a teeming country in Asia, but despite the efforts of the government to contain it, it soon spreads throughout the world. Some victims experience an uncontrolled immune response called a cytokine storm, causing them to drown in their own fluids. In America, schools close as citizens shelter at home. Grocery store shelves empty, and the United States is plunged into the worst depression since the 1930s.
How does an outbreak evolve into an epidemic and finally a pandemic? In Episode 4 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss how the coronavirus crisis has been mishandled by the Trump administration, as well as the history of institutional and governmental response to public health crises. Their guest, Laurie Garrett, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer and the author of The Coming Plague, a book about emerging diseases in the twentieth century. The current fiasco may feel like it came out of nowhere, but it’s the result of countless concerted policy decisions. “You can’t do public health by privatizing it,” Garrett points out. “The societies that have tried have seen it fail.”