A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, the world watched as the disease killed half a million and counting, and brought the nation to its knees. A stunned nation has been too busy with grieving and damage control to ask why, or to even start to understand that much of what passed for error and chaos in the pandemic response was actually deliberate or entirely predictable. Nina Burleigh, in her book VIRUS, provides some shocking answers.
Nina Burleigh is a reporter and author of six prior books, including most recently The Trump Women: Part of the Deal and the New York Times bestseller The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italian Trials of Amanda Knox, of which Tim Egan wrote: “Clear-eyed, sweeping, honest and tough… sets a standard that any of the other chroniclers of this tale have yet to meet. This is what long-form journalism is all about.” She most recently covered America under Donald Trump as national politics correspondent at Newsweek. She got her start in journalism covering the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois and is a fellow of the Explorers Club who has covered stories on six continents.
Burleigh’s writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Time, New York, The New York Times Magazine, Slate and Bustle. She has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, Good Morning America, Nightline, The Today Show, 48 Hours, on MSNBC, CNN and C-Span, NPR, in numerous documentaries, podcasts, and radio programs. A former judge for the J. Anthony Lukas prize for nonfiction, Burleigh is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her work has been cited in hundreds of scholarly articles.
This talk took place on May 13, 2021, at 7:00 pm EDT.