And why our pandemic playbook didn't save us.
President Trump graded his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic recently as worthy of an A+, characterizing his own response as “phenomenal.” It was widely regarded as an, er, generous grade, considering more than 200,000 Americans have died on his watch so far. Americans account for just 4 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of Covid-19 deaths. |
How did this happen? Under George W. Bush’s leadership, the United States literally wrote the pandemic playbook, creating a response plan complete with early testing, contact tracing, masks, social distancing and communications protocols. These approaches were well known and proved to be effective during other epidemics, including the SARS and MERS outbreaks. |
So how did the richest country in the world, the one arguably most prepared to deal with a pandemic, end up with so many preventable deaths? Who is responsible? Did China conceal information? Did New York City’s leaders mess up? Did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blow it? And what about Trump? |
 | | The New York Times |
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Back in April, the media critic Jay Rosen tweeted that “The battle to prevent Americans from understanding what went down January to April will be one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in modern U.S. history.” The fight over the narrative of Covid-19 took center stage during Tuesday’s presidential debate, when Trump claimed that millions more would have died if not for his leadership. |
We journalists are in the accountability business. So we’ve published a short film tracking how the United States bungled Covid-19, looking as far back as 2003 and culminating in the summer of 2020. We hope it helps you understand the backdrop of this national failure and offers context for the competing narratives. Most of all, we hope it helps establish a measure of accountability. |
To assemble this video, I paired two very different journalists: our Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nick Kristof and Johnny Harris, one of the pioneers of the Vox video explainer format (like this one about the Syrian civil war) who began his career as a visual storyteller at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. |
It’s always a challenge to explain a long-running news story while it’s still unfolding. We hope this video offers some clarity in the face of so much tragedy, chaos and misinformation. As Nick says in the video, some of us at The Times have covered mass deaths in the developing world — but we never imagined witnessing such a tragedy in our own country. |
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