She has bilateral pneumonia and acute respiratory distress. The doctors explain her inflammation to me as a “cytokine storm” that is ravaging her body. Her decline is steep, only 17 days between diagnosis and death. Looking back at our messages over those 17 days, I am struck by a reversal: I am the one reaching…
She gave an interview to The Daily Show in 2014, claiming vaccines are “full of toxins.” The title of the segment was “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy” and compared the progressive anti-vaccination movement to conservative climate-change denialists. “You can line up the doctors from here to down the block refuting me, but I’m not going…
How the reporter Matt Richtel spoke to adolescents and parents for this series In mid-April, I was speaking to the mother of a suicidal teenager whose struggles I’ve been closely following. I asked how her daughter was doing. Not well, the mother said: “If we can’t find something drastic to help this kid, this kid…
The outbreak in Beijing is another blow to the already stumbling Chinese economy. Waves of selling hit the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets on Monday, driving down by 4.9 percent in a single day the CSI 300 Index of large Chinese companies’ share prices. While the entire city of Shanghai has been locked down for…
Visionaries is a limited series that looks at figures who are trying to transform the way we live. Dr. Rachel Hardeman’s journey to understanding community health care began in Cuba, where she studied medicine and public health at the Latin American School of Medicine from 2002 to 2004. “That’s really where I learned not just…
Wearing masks during the pandemic has long been a divisive issue in the United States. And now that a federal judge has tossed out the mask mandate for planes and public transportation, rules in some places have been thrown into chaos. Many were lifted, and a few reimposed. But even as the changes cause some…
SILENT INVASION: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too LateBy Deborah Birx On March 2, 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx took up her new position as coronavirus response coordinator within the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She was fresh off a plane from South Africa, where she…
When state officials and government regulators were concerned that some counties in the United States would be left without a carrier willing to sell insurance under the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Neidorff agreed to provide coverage in some of those markets, said Jesse Hunter, a former chief strategy officer for Centene, and “there was never…
Several hundred children ages 5 to 11 have died of Covid since the pandemic began, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but pediatric shots have been a hard sell for many parents. Only about 28 percent of children in that age group have received two doses and would be eligible for a…
“It’s low, but there is no zero risk situation on an airplane,” said Dr. Aisha Khatib, the chair of a group focused on responsible travel for the International Society of Travel Medicine, adding that the risk goes up in a surge situation and while getting on and off planes if the ventilation system is not…