At the height of the pandemic, COVID-19 was talked about as “the great equalizer,” an idea touted by celebrities and politicians from Madonna to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But that was a myth.

Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research worked with The COVID Tracking Project to compile national numbers on how COVID-19 affected people of color in the U.S. Their effort, The COVID Racial Data Tracker, showed that people of color died from the disease at around twice the rate of White people.

The COVID Tracking Project’s volunteer data collection team waited months for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release COVID-19 testing data. But when the CDC finally started publishing the data, it was different from what states were publishing—in some instances, it was off by hundreds of thousands of tests. With no clear answers about why, The COVID Tracking Project’s quest to keep national data flowing every day continued until March 2021.

This week on Reveal: We examine the myth of COVID-19 as “the great equalizer,” what went wrong in the CDC’s response to the pandemic, and whether it’s prepared for the next one.

This Peabody Award-nominated three-part series is hosted by epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera and reported by Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler from The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2023.

Dig Deeper

Listen: The whole COVID Tracking Project series

Explore: The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic

Credits

the covid tracking project

Series host: Jessica Malaty Rivera | Series producers and reporters: Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler | Series editor: Michael I Schiller | Production assistants: Max Maldonado, Kori Suzuki, and Aarushi Sahejpal | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Post-production team: Kathryn Styer Martinez and Aisha Wallace-Palomares | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Co-executive producers: Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler | Special thanks to The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic | This series is presented by Tableau.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and let’s go back to March 2020. It’s the early days of the pandemic. Most of us are at home, trying to figure out what’s safe.  
Speaker 2:I am going to treat this proo–I’m going to dump it in some soapy water here. Disinfecting more liberally. Spray. The disinfectant rate on those items, on these groceries.  
Al Letson:Life just shifts into this alternate reality. People start dancing together on Instagram. Celebrities do concerts from their living rooms.  
Speaker 3:I want to thank all the healthcare workers risking their lives to save ours. Thank you guys so much.  
Al Letson:Madonna posts a video that goes viral.  
Madonna:That’s the thing about COVID-19, it doesn’t care about how rich you are, how famous you are, how funny you are, how smart you are, how old you are.  
Al Letson:She’s in a bathtub. The water is cloudy and filled with flower petals.  
Madonna:It’s the great equalizer.  
Al Letson:Suddenly, Madonna’s deep thoughts in the bathtub start shaping the way people talk about COVID.  
Andrew Cuomo:Everyone is subject to this virus. It is the great equalizer.  
Al Letson:Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York at the time, starts running with it, and if you listen to him side by side with that Madonna video, you can tell it matches almost verbatim.  
Andrew Cuomo:I don’t care how smart–  
Madonna:How smart you are–  
Andrew Cuomo:How rich–  
Madonna:How rich you are–  
Andrew Cuomo:How powerful you think you are. I don’t care how young, how old–  
Madonna:How old you are–  
Andrew Cuomo:This virus is the great equalizer.  
Al Letson:This idea that COVID makes us all equally vulnerable starts popping up all over.  
 But the thing is, it’s not true.  
Ibram X. Kendi:People wanted to believe the myth that COVID was the great equalizer and that race didn’t matter. Just as I think people want to believe that myth in general.  
Al Letson:Ibram X. Kendi is a MacArthur Genius fellow and author of How to Be an Anti-Racist.  
Ibram X. Kendi:It’s very easy to believe that race or racism isn’t having an impact on the pandemic when you don’t have any racial data to prove or disprove that.  
Al Letson:At the beginning of April, 2020, only a handful of cities and states are reporting racial demographics for COVID. We don’t know how many black people are dying from the virus across the nation or how many Latinos have tested positive. So Ibram publishes an article in the Atlantic and asked the question, why don’t we know who the Coronavirus victims are?  
Ibram X. Kendi:I think by the end of the first week of April, a handful of states and counties had released racial demographic data and we immediately started seeing racial disparities.  
 I started to think that just as people are tracking COVID data in general, we need to be tracking racial data, and I connected with the COVID tracking project to build the COVID racial data tracker.  
Al Letson:The COVID tracking project is a volunteer effort to compile COVID data from across the U.S. They join up with Ibram’s team at Boston University Center for anti-racist research to gather numbers on how COVID is hitting black and brown communities. They call it the COVID Racial Data tracker.  
Ibram X. Kendi:The pandemic revealed the ways in which there’s so many populations that sit in the sort of shadows, like literally in the shadows. Certain states are lumping certain racial groups together while others are separating them.  
Al Letson:The data that does exist on state health websites reveals the unequal impact of COVID.  
Ibram X. Kendi:The data showed that black people and native people were typically dying of COVID at the highest rates. The data showed that Latinx Americans were typically more likely to contract coronavirus than their white counterparts.  
Al Letson:In the summer of 2020, data from the COVID tracking project shows in cases where race is known, people of color are dying at around twice the rate of white people.  
Ibram X. Kendi:So COVID was not the great equalizer, and if anything, it exacerbated the challenges that already exist that led to people of color being more likely to face this disease and die from it.  
Al Letson:Today, on Reveal, we’re bringing you the final installment of our three-part series that originally aired in 2023 investigating why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underperformed during the COVID pandemic, especially when it came to having good data. This is the COVID tracking project, part three. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera is our guide.  
Jessica Malaty …:After the COVID Racial Data Tracker launches, the CDC puts out a report detailing who is most impacted by COVID. In it, the CDC says that their race and ethnicity data continues to improve, but more complete data might be found from sources like the COVID tracking project.  
Speaker 2:[Crosstalk 00:06:09]  
Jessica Malaty …:Earlier in the series, we told you how the COVID tracking project started. In March of 2020, the CDC wasn’t providing up-to-date COVID data, so two reporters went state by state to try and figure out how many people had been tested for the virus in the U.S. They wrote a story about it for the Atlantic. Their work inspired an army of volunteers, including me, to join them. Together we compiled the numbers from all 50 states into one central database.  
Speaker 2:[crosstalk 00:06:45]  
Jessica Malaty …:In April, the COVID tracking project volunteers are still filling a void. We’re providing all kinds of essential information from racial data to case counts to hospitalizations and deaths.  
Speaker 2:[Crosstalk 00:07:16]  
Speaker 3:Johns Hopkins University, one of the top ranked public health schools in the world, is pulling our testing and hospitalization data directly into their dashboard. News stations are reading the numbers daily.`  
Speaker 2:[Crosstalk 00:07:30]  
Alexis Madrigal:Basically everyone on this earth was using those numbers.  
Jessica Malaty …:Alexis Madrigal is one of the co-founders of the project.  
Alexis Madrigal:And they were using them as a substitute for what the CDC numbers were. Dozens to even sometimes hundreds of local television stations.  
Speaker 3:[Crosstalk 00:07:48]  
Alexis Madrigal:They would directly replicate our charts. Whatever chart we made, they would just slap it into their graphics package and run it, hundreds of time a day.  
Jessica Malaty …:It started as a piece of journalism, but a month and a half later, COVID tracking project is a public service with hundreds of volunteers putting in shifts day and night.  
 And people inside the government tell us they’re using our numbers too.  
 The stress of it is getting to all of us. Alexis has lost 20 pounds. Volunteers are burning out. We have a system to double check the numbers, but we can’t catch everything.  
Alexis Madrigal:I mean, I can still remember one time we published an extra zero on New Jersey or on New York and I was just crushed. It was a true just fat finger, one extra digit. If you go back and look at the tweets from that time I was doing all the tweets, I was always just apologizing profusely like we’re doing the best we can.  
Jessica Malaty …:Co-director Erin Kissane is feeling the anxiety too.  
Erin Kissane:It is really terrifying to manually input National pandemic numbers that we are finding out are being used by the federal government.  
Jessica Malaty …:One of her routines at the time is to watch all of the White House COVID press conferences and in April she starts to notice an eerie similarity to the numbers COVID tracking project is publishing.  
Erin Kissane:The numbers Mike Pence read on the television were our numbers, but rounded.  
Jessica Malaty …:On April 1st, the COVID tracking project reports 1,306,569 tests conducted, and the next day.  
Mike Pence:At the present moment, more than 1.3 million tests have been performed, and as you–  
Jessica Malaty …:On April 2nd, the COVID tracking project reports 1,437,715 tests. Then the following day–  
Mike Pence:More than 1.4 million tests have been performed across the country, and as you all are aware, some 200–  
Jessica Malaty …:On April 14th, the COVID tracking project reports 27,871 deaths. A day later–  
Mike Pence:Sadly, we mourn the loss of more than 27,000 of our countrymen.  
Speaker 8:And eventually the White House just comes right out and says it.  
Erin Kissane:The Trump White House published their Reopening America report. They put our testing data in the report so they weren’t just privately using the numbers. It was like, are you kidding me? I mean, we’re doing the best job we can. We’re really trying to be great volunteer public health data people, but this is what you have. This is what you’re using? Yeah, it was terrible.  
Jessica Malaty …:Aaron, Alexis, and volunteers like me are just waiting for the CDC to publish timely and accurate COVID data because as soon as that happens, we can stop. Everyone is just exhausted.  
Alexis Madrigal:Then one day the CDC published some testing data.  
Jessica Malaty …:A volunteer first notices it on May 13th, 2020.  
Speaker 16:I remember it more clearly than almost any one part of the project. It is burned in.  
Speaker 17:I think it was about a hundred days into the pandemic.  
Speaker 16:It was like a sunny morning, walked outside my front door, the birds were singing and I fainted like a Victorian, sensationalist novel character. I walked outside. I didn’t fall down, but my blood pressure just went away and I had to lie down on the sidewalk because the physical relief just hit me in the body that we were going to get to put this down, and my partner came out and was like, are you okay? What’s going on? And I was like, the CDC published the data.  
Jessica Malaty …:Erin and Alexis discovered the CDC, had quietly started publishing state COVID testing data five days earlier. No notice, no post, no memo, no tweet, nothing.  
Erin Kissane:A lot of people still didn’t know that CDC DC had published this because there was no way to know. You really had to be a nerd digging through CDC’s website to even discover that they were doing it.  
Jessica Malaty …:New national and state-level, COVID case counts, death counts and testing data is suddenly available to be downloaded from the CDC website.  
Alexis Madrigal:I remember seeing the CDC data and saying to myself like, oh man, we did it. Here we go. We got the CDC to publish these numbers, and the big question was, did this match up? If it matched up with what we were creating, then we were done.  
Jessica Malaty …:So Alexis downloads the testing data from the CDC website and starts comparing it to the data from the COVID tracking project.  
Alexis Madrigal:So pull down the CDC data, throw it into a spreadsheet, and essentially see that it’s more or less the worst case scenario, which is the data is different for almost all the states.  
Jessica Malaty …:Alexis goes down the line state by state, he compares the numbers.  
Alexis Madrigal:You wanted that difference to be zero.  
Jessica Malaty …:But it’s not. The testing numbers are off by hundreds of thousands. California was reporting about 200,000 fewer tests than the CDC, but Florida was the opposite. It was reporting about 200,000 more. There were only three states, plus the District of Columbia, where the CDC’s numbers matched precisely.  
Alexis Madrigal:I tried to have a little bit of hope like, oh, well, maybe we can explain it.  
Erin Kissane:And maybe the testing data is going to rapidly get much better and we’ll be done. We’ll be done here.  
Jessica Malaty …:Alexis decides to reach out to one of his contacts in the federal government, Amy Gleason, she works on the data team for the White House Coronavirus task force. Amy’s been trying to get COVID data flowing between states, hospitals, and the federal agencies.  
Amy Gleason:We got a congrats email from Alexis and we had a conversation and he’s like, so does this mean we can stop now? Is all this is going to be good? And we had to have that conversation that our data really wasn’t yet at the level that you could get in the COVID tracking project, and so I asked him not to stop. It was a hard thing. That was my personal opinion, not anything from the government’s perspective.  
Alexis Madrigal:All I really remember from that time was everybody being like, no, yeah, definitely don’t stop doing that.  
Jessica Malaty …:So Alexis and Erin hold an emergency meeting for everyone on the project.  
Erin Kissane:Did we announce this again in announcements?  
Alexis Madrigal:Oh yeah. Like a hey, it’s right now.  
Erin Kissane:Yeah. If somebody could drop a Zoom link–  
Jessica Malaty …:They need to fill people in on the CDC data release.  
Alexis Madrigal:The first thing to say is we are not going to have quite the normal all-hands meeting here in part because we have quite seismic event in the CDC beginning to put out data that we’ve all sort of wanted to see for a long time.  
Jessica Malaty …:Alexis and Erin talk about what they’re seeing in the data and mull over what the COVID tracking project should do next.  
Alexis Madrigal:Because the CDC waited so long to do this, waited until 80,000 people had died before they put these numbers out. There’s going to be a period of confusion here, and I think we can just help.  
Jessica Malaty …:They announced that they’re assembling a team to write a report.  
Erin Kissane:We’ll have something for the CDC to look at before the weekend.  
Jessica Malaty …:The plan is to figure out why there’s a difference between COVID tracking project data and this new data from the CDC.  
 And for the next four days, more than 30 people turn out this report. Alexis, Aaron and I spend hours on the phone trying to interpret what the CDC’s numbers mean because with the numbers this different, it’s obvious that something is very wrong.  
Alexis Madrigal:You couldn’t have testing numbers that were wildly different going out at the state level and the federal level and not be able to at least even begin to explain why that was.  
Erin Kissane:I stayed up all night one night to finish up the report analysis and I’m too old to do that.  
Jessica Malaty …:Our testing numbers come directly from state websites, so where is the CDC getting their numbers? There’s no pattern. We publish our report and Alexis tries to get anyone from the CDC on the phone to talk it through.  
Alexis Madrigal:I was making a lot of calls into the CDC. I was trying to get CDC people to talk to me off the record.  
Erin Kissane:Over and over and over.  
Alexis Madrigal:Trying to get people there to talk about what was happening,  
Erin Kissane:And generally what we got was no response at all.  
Alexis Madrigal:I actually failed pretty spectacularly. I’ve never gotten a CDC person to tell me anything. Very interesting.  
Erin Kissane:They weren’t going to talk to us. If I take the most charitable perspective, it was probably insulting. I mean, we were amateurs all the way through.  
Jessica Malaty …:We’re stunned by the crickets. We never give up trying to reach them, but we also never succeed in getting anyone at the CDC to engage us in a meaningful conversation about their data. At one point, we hear from a government source that the COVID tracking project is giving the CDC indigestion.  
Erin Kissane:The entire time, we had been pulling for the CDC to come out and do the work because they had everything. They had the authority, the public health expertise, they are the actual government. It is their job. The whole project, we advocated in every way we could for the CDC to do the work of making good data public.  
Alexis Madrigal:The whole point was to get them to release the data. That was the journalism accountability component of this project.  
Jessica Malaty …:What started out as a journalism project had turned into something else, a substitute for government data.  
Alexis Madrigal:We were like, oh shit, this actually is being used as a replacement and the CDC’s release doesn’t actually change that. And from then on, we had to think infrastructure.  
Jessica Malaty …:At this point, we realized that the federal government has been relying on us as infrastructure for weeks. Our data is being used by teams at FEMA to place testing sites across the country and distribute ventilators and testing supplies. And the White House Coronavirus Task Force is sending our numbers to all 50 governors in their daily report.  
Erin Kissane:We felt really responsible. There are periods where we felt like if we did not do the work we were doing, people wouldn’t know in time what was going to happen. It is a crushing responsibility to feel that way. I know there are people in public health who have chosen that work and are professionally prepared to be part of that, and most of us were not.  
Al Letson:Coming up, a miscalculation triggers a travel quarantine.  
Speaker 19:This is really impacting travel restrictions for Rhode islanders. I really need to escalate this.  
Al Letson:And we take a blunt look at the federal response to COVID.  
Speaker 20:Until we admit to ourselves, whatever we put in place is still not enough, we’re just going to keep doing more of the same.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 In the US, COVID-19 hit assisted living facilities and nursing homes harder than anywhere else, claiming an outsized number of lives.  
Speaker 2:At The COVID Tracking Project, they reported that even though less than 1%…  
Speaker 3:Less than 1% of the population.  
Speaker 2:… lives in long-term care facilities.  
Speaker 4:That’s nursing homes and assisted living centers.  
Speaker 3:But have had 40% of the COVID deaths.  
Speaker 4:40% of virus-related deaths.  
Al Letson:The federal government and the CDC didn’t have accurate numbers about how many people were dying across the country, but The COVID Tracking Project did. Their data showed that in the first year of the pandemic, about 175,000 people had died from the virus in these facilities, and that data proved crucial. Federal officials used that information to help justify their decision about where to send vaccines first.  
Speaker 2:As of last week, those people account for more than a third of all COVID deaths in this country.  
Al Letson:Today, we’re bringing you the story of The COVID Tracking Project and asking why it had to exist in the first place. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera takes it from here.  
Jessica Malaty …:The COVID Tracking Project collects data from each state every day and puts it into one central database for the nation. But what we publish is only as good as what states provide. So to motivate states to give us the most complete data, we start giving them letter grades.  
Speaker 6:Our data has been given an A+ grade.  
Speaker 7:The COVID Tracking Project gives Arizona an A+.  
Speaker 8:A+.  
Speaker 9:An A+ rating from The COVID Tracking…  
Speaker 10:An A+ from The COVID Tracking Project.  
Jessica Malaty …:We’re grading states because there are no national data standards, which makes it really hard to know things like are cases rising in your state and how does that compare to states around you. It’s the kind of stuff that citizens expect the CDC to provide in the middle of a pandemic.  
Alexis Madrigal:The idea that you wouldn’t be able to tell people how many people had COVID around them while asking them to take extraordinary measures in their own lives, that you were just like, “Well, probably some,” but you wouldn’t actually have a number, that struck me as completely unhinged.  
Jessica Malaty …:That’s Alexis Madrigal, co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project.  
Alexis Madrigal:There was a need for data and data analysis that the CDC refused to provide, and it opened up all this space that other people filled. So some of those people are The New York Times and Hopkins and ourselves.  
Jessica Malaty …:Since early April, Johns Hopkins University has been publishing our state testing data on their website, but then in mid-May they do something different with it. They start using the data to build an automated tool, a test positivity tracker.  
Alexis Madrigal:Hopkins came up with this testing tracker, which just used COVID Tracking Project data and did some very basic calculations of positivity rate and things like that.  
Jessica Malaty …:In other words, how many COVID tests are coming back positive? Do a lot of people have COVID in your state?  
Alexis Madrigal:At first, that seemed fine, but we came to really feel and heard from states that that tracker was causing a lot of problems.  
Jessica Malaty …:States are using these automated numbers calculated by the Johns Hopkins tracker to determine travel restrictions. Because the data is so inconsistent, the calculations are not always right. In July, the tracker makes North Dakota’s positivity rate look really high, which causes anyone coming from North Dakota to be put on New York’s mandatory quarantine list. North Dakota’s governor, Doug Burgum, talks about it in a press conference.  
Doug Burgum:John Hopkins is using the COVID tracking data. I think there’s state-by-state comparison issues. There is some data from North Dakota that wasn’t accurate in there.  
Jessica Malaty …:The same thing happens in Rhode Island. Producer Kara Oehler is working on The COVID Tracking Project at the time, and she’s been communicating with state public health departments for months. One morning she gets a voicemail from a government official.  
Speaker 13:Hi, Kara. I work in the governor’s office at Rhode Island.  
Jessica Malaty …:The Johns Hopkins tracker calculations are triggering a travel warning for Rhode Island. A mandatory quarantine goes into place for Rhode Islanders traveling to certain states.  
Speaker 13:This is really impacting travel restrictions for Rhode Islanders. We’ve now just been put on the list for Massachusetts and Connecticut, our two neighboring states. I really need to escalate this. If you could do anything to help me out, that would be great. Thank you. Bye.  
Jessica Malaty …:Let’s pause for a moment. The COVID Tracking Project didn’t cause the travel restrictions for the people of Rhode Island. We collected their data and Rhode Island did great. We gave them an A+. But the problem was they weren’t reporting on Sundays, so when they played catch up on Mondays and entered the weekend data into the system, the Johns Hopkins tracker calculated what looked like a spike in positive tests, but it was really just because public health officials took Sunday off, hence the travel ban.  
Alexis Madrigal:You basically had COVID Tracking Project data filtered through this dashboard that we couldn’t control dictate the policies of states, and it was a disaster.  
Jessica Malaty …:The snafus that are causing travel restrictions eventually get worked out, but this whole thing could have been avoided. All any state needed was clear guidance from the CDC on when and how to report data and how not to use data, basic data standards.  
Speaker 14:Is anybody keeping an eye on Tennessee?  
Speaker 15:To the extent that I am, yes.  
Speaker 16:Yeah, I’ve checked it a bunch of times too.  
Speaker 17:Yeah, me too.  
Jessica Malaty …:Every day for a whole year of the pandemic, The COVID Tracking Project collects data for the country.  
Speaker 18:Texas had another weird drop.  
Speaker 15:Sounds like Texas.  
Speaker 19:So we may need to add a note for Texas.  
Jessica Malaty …:We provide a data backbone for two presidential administrations. Our work is used for vaccine analyses and national COVID response plans. Congress uses our data about nursing homes, and the NAACP uses our race and ethnicity data in lawsuits with states and the federal government.  
Speaker 15:Elliot, can you look at Idaho thread?  
Speaker 20:Utah is okay.  
Speaker 21:Checking Tennessee.  
Speaker 22:New Mexico just went actually.  
Jessica Malaty …:It’s hard, but satisfying work. Once people start volunteering, it’s tough to put it down.  
Speaker 23:Everyone who has been working on it did so at significant cost to their personal lives.  
Speaker 24:Everyone’s made insane personal sacrifice. I’m not the only one who’s walked away from school and my graduation, everything. So I don’t know. I would love to take away any of the negative repercussions of the work here, but I don’t really think you can.  
Jessica Malaty …:We’re a tight-knit organization and kind of trauma bonded by all the work we do. Feels like we’ve been doing this for years. We celebrate birthdays, mourn losses. We meet each other’s kids and pets.  
Speaker 25:My cat is making noise. I’m just waiting him to stop.  
Speaker 26:Who’s dog is barking?  
Speaker 27:Mine.  
Speaker 26:[inaudible 00:07:02].  
Jessica Malaty …:We make sense of the pandemic and what’s happening across the globe together.  
Speaker 28:This project and all of our people are so integrated into my way of processing the world.  
Jessica Malaty …:Through it all, we keep gathering the data.  
Speaker 29:I checked Florida and Texas.  
Speaker 21:Checking Tennessee.  
Speaker 30:So Colorado and Tennessee outstanding.  
Speaker 31:Okay, North Dakota.  
Jessica Malaty …:And then we decided it was time to stop.  
Speaker 2:The last year during this pandemic, the data compiled by the folks at The COVID Tracking Project, it’s been a huge part of our coverage of COVID.  
Jessica Malaty …:The COVID Tracking Project went pencils down exactly a year after it started.  
Speaker 2:Last night’s update was the final day of data collection for The COVID Tracking Project.  
Jessica Malaty …:We didn’t stop because the CDC data was so amazing and then we became redundant. We just had to.  
Speaker 2:They’re now stepping back because they believe that this should be a job for the federal government.  
Jessica Malaty …:Volunteerism has this great place in American society, but it should not be the basis of our nation’s infrastructure, especially when we’re talking about the response to a public health emergency.  
Speaker 32:This has stolen time from families and jobs and school and lives, and also so many of us were so exhausted.  
Jessica Malaty …:People had full-time jobs and families that they needed to get back to, and it just required hundreds of people kind of dropping everything else in order to do this. But we were still worried about the future of COVID data.  
Speaker 33:The hospitalization numbers came back up in New Jersey.  
Speaker 34:Somebody can have Tennessee. I have a really hard time getting it to show up for me.  
Speaker 35:Georgia started reporting antigen tests.  
Speaker 36:Alabama didn’t update.  
Speaker 37:Iowa is done.  
Jessica Malaty …:On March 7, 2021, we tweeted out the day’s COVID data for the last time. Alexis and co-founder Erin Kissane gathered people together for a final goodbye.  
Alexis Madrigal:With our last few minutes here, I just want to say one last thing to you all about this project. The first step in the accountability that I think we all want to see is assessing the toll. It’s counting.  
Jessica Malaty …:In one year, we had counted more than 28 million cases and more than a half a million deaths, but along the way there was a historic public health breakthrough, the COVID-19 vaccines. We saw vaccines being distributed to people most at risk and deaths started to slow down. It gave us hope.  
Alexis Madrigal:And now things are getting better. We’re looking into a hopeful future where the government does its job, where the pandemic eases and ends. Thank you all. That’s it. That’s our last all hands I think. Erin, got anything?  
Erin Kissane:Thank you, everyone. That’s the whole story. Thank you all.  
Alexis Madrigal:All right. Bye.  
Speaker 39:All right, guys. That will be a wrap on [inaudible 00:09:55] shift.  
Speaker 40:Bye-bye.  
Speaker 41:Bye.  
Speaker 42:Bye. Take good care.  
Speaker 43:Bye-bye.  
Speaker 44:Bye.  
Speaker 45:Bye.  
Speaker 46:Bye, guys.  
Speaker 47:Bye. Data to the people.  
Speaker 48:Bye.  
Speaker 49:Bye-bye.  
Jessica Malaty …:When The COVID Tracking Project shut down, we knew a lot of the things we built like the COVID racial data tracker and the long-term care tracker wouldn’t continue, and so our nation’s understanding of the impact on these communities would become largely invisible. There was a real sense of loss, but there was also hope that some of the systems that the government put into place throughout the first year of the pandemic would carry the nation forward. We saw federal COVID hospitalization data go from non-existent to covering almost every hospital by the end of the year.  
Dr Deborah Birx:It is important that we look at both what worked and what didn’t work and address those issues in real time to save American lives.  
Jessica Malaty …:That’s Dr. Deborah Birx testifying in front of congress in 2022. She was the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force at the beginning of the pandemic. Her team built the system that got 98% of hospitals reporting.  
Dr Deborah Birx:CDC wasn’t going to do it. They wouldn’t stand up that database. They wouldn’t get 6,000 hospitals reporting. They believed that modeling was more accurate than the real-time data.  
Jessica Malaty …:Dr. Birx spent decades in public health and much of her career working for the CDC. She says the agency needs a major overhaul to be ready for the next pandemic.  
Dr Deborah Birx:Over the last couple of decades, they became a historic looking backwards public health institution rather than a proactive, let’s use data and even dirty data in real time to address major public health problems. They became much more theoretic public health rather than action-oriented public health.  
Jessica Malaty …:Dr. Birx says it will take more than adding people and funding to fix a broken public health system.  
Dr Deborah Birx:Our systems, the way we organize them failed and we just had to be that honest. It failed us at the beginning. It’s failing us now. We still have more deaths than most other countries that are developed as much as we are. We are failing. And until we admit to ourselves whatever we put in place is still not enough, we’re just going to keep doing more of the same. So don’t ever blame it on people and funding. That is just an excuse. CDC’s issues are really around decisions and lack of accountability.  
Al Letson:In August 2022, the CDC announced that the agency needed a reset.  
Speaker 51:After a review found missteps in the COVID response, Dr. Rochelle Walensky has announced major changes for the agency are on the way.  
Al Letson:Coming up after the break, Jessica interviews former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky.  
Rochelle Walens…:We’re about 60,000 public health workers in deficit. Our laboratory infrastructure within the nation, across the nation has been under invested in and our data systems across the nation have been under invested in.  
Al Letson:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson, and in this episode we are bringing you an update to a series we first aired last year about the federal government’s flawed response to the pandemic. In the summer of 2022, the CDC conducted an internal review showing that it was responsible for large public mistakes in the way it handled COVID-19.  
Rochelle Walens…:I think we need to recognize that in our big moment, our performance didn’t reliably meet the expectations of this country, and that’s exactly why I called for this reset.  
Al Letson:The CDC director at the time, Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced that major changes were on the way.  
Rochelle Walens…:And my goal really as we hit this reset was to have a new public health action-oriented culture that really emphasizes accountability, that emphasizes collaboration with our public health partners across the country, communication to the American public and timeliness.  
Al Letson:Epidemiologist, Jessica Malaty Rivera had an opportunity to interview Dr. Walensky about this so-called reset in 2023 back when Walensky was still leading the CDC.  
Jessica Malaty …:Hello Dr. Walensky. It’s nice to meet you.  
Rochelle Walens…:Good afternoon, Jessica.  
Jessica Malaty …:Thank you for taking the time to do this interview.  
Rochelle Walens…:Of course. Happy to.  
Jessica Malaty …:Recently you’ve made a number of really big statements about some pretty dramatic changes and even some public mistakes from testing to data communications. So I’m curious if you can help us understand how this reorganized reimagined CDC will work.  
Rochelle Walens…:Yeah, thank you for the opportunity here. I came into the agency in January of 2021, and one of the things that became very clear is that we had lessons that we needed to learn as an agency and as public health across the nation. We need to have implementable public health guidance, that we need to communicate better, that we need a workforce that is ready to respond, able to respond, and we need to be a better partner. We also, as part of this, took on a reorganization in the agency and part of that reorganization was to promote accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness.  
Jessica Malaty …:Right. I’d like to ideate a little bit with you and imagine that say there’s another deadly virus and it’s just beginning to spread in the United States. Could you be very specific about how would that be different from three years ago?  
Rochelle Walens…:CDC and the United States started this pandemic on a particularly frail public health infrastructure. There have been studies that have demonstrated that we’re about 60,000 public health workers in deficit. Our laboratory infrastructure within the nation, across the nation, has been under invested in, and our data systems across the nation have been under invested in. You can order a coffee by a QR code, but we were still at CDC getting results by fax from over 3000 different jurisdictions. We at CDC are the federal agency, but we rely on a really robust public health infrastructure across the country, and that infrastructure has been under invested in four decades.  
Jessica Malaty …:You took the words from my mouth when it comes to these data systems that are outdated and underfunded. A big problem with the federal response to COVID was the way data was collected, especially in those early days. There was not a federal system that could track actual case numbers and we only really could rely on estimates. Has the CDC fixed that part of it?  
Rochelle Walens…:There are numerous pieces to the challenge I think that you are conveying. One is our data system. Just to give a sense of the complexity of the data that we receive, we receive data from 64 states and territories in big cities. We receive data from over 3000 counties. We receive data from over 574 tribes. All of those data are (a) not standardized in how they are collected, and (b) they don’t come in on a common data system. That is the hard work that we are doing in our data modernization efforts. Can we have a similar architecture by which all of the data are flowing in so that when they are delivered to CDC, we can rapidly deliver them back to the local jurisdiction so that they can know what’s happening around them, and we’ve made massive strides in our ability to do that. We still have a lot of work to do.  
 I want to separate those data highways from the other challenge that we have and that is that we at CDC cannot compel that data come to us. We rely on voluntary reporting from state and local jurisdictions and sometimes that reporting comes and sometimes it doesn’t. From a COVID standpoint, during a public health emergency we have more authority to compel that those data come in. But again, they are slow, so it makes it very hard to make smart decisions even if you have the data systems if the data don’t come to you.  
Jessica Malaty …:Right. The cry for standardized data was probably our hallmark at the COVID Tracking Project because we went to those states to get it individually from those state public health departments and noticed that the lack of standardization makes it really difficult to normalize the data to make it useful for the public. Would you say that it’s the responsibility then for CDC to provide those federal standards and then eventually with Congressional help potentially compel the states to follow those standards?  
Rochelle Walens…:That would be what we would like to do. We are happy to convey the standards what would be a best practice. What we can’t do is compel it, and that is actually where we really are asking help for Congress. Not because we want the data for ourselves, but we want the data so that we can swiftly deliver it back. You are exactly right. It is because of the lack of standardization, because of the lack of our ability to have the data come in, and because we at CDC have to be the place where the federal government receives the data, we rely on the formal delivery of data through the state and local health departments, which is where we had limitations.  
Jessica Malaty …:Yeah. Let’s get specific about some of the legislation then. If we were going to think about what Congress would actually have to do, and if you had your pen on that paper to write down the letters of this bill, what would it say to actually cause that change to happen? Dream big here.  
Rochelle Walens…:Yeah, so there are a couple of things. My dream here would be to have a common highway so that when data come into us, the data can come back to you. It’s also the case that I would very much like to have a standardization in how the data are reported. Race and ethnicity, very important. Rural, urban, very important. I can’t really know what’s going on around me unless I know what’s happening in the local jurisdictions around me. How does that all fit in?  
Jessica Malaty …:Right. To bring it back to why we had to do what we did, the COVID Tracking Project compiled this data. I’m curious, why do you think the COVID Tracking Project had to exist and what does that tell us about the CDC, the state of public health, the state of public health infrastructure?  
Rochelle Walens…:When there is not a technology platform, a modernized platform where that data can standardly, fluidly come into your public health agency and then be compiled and compelled to come in, then you require outside sources in order to be able to do that. We did not have the public health data systems. We at CDC were receiving data from states by fax machine. That’s unacceptable. It’s just unacceptable in public health. If that is how your federal public health system is receiving data, that’s the pace at which you’ll get it back.  
Jessica Malaty …:Right.  
Rochelle Walens…:It is not standardized, it is not swift. Really so much of that work of the data modernization efforts is the fluid highways that the COVID Tracking Project could put together, but we need a federal system that can do that and that’s the work that we have ahead of us.  
Jessica Malaty …:Is the hope for the CDC to be doing that type of really granular, deep digging of that data in the next pandemic because we know it’s going to come.  
Rochelle Walens…:My vision, my gold pot here would be that we have the resources to provide local public health, the data systems and highways so that they can create the architecture locally to be able to bring those data to us swiftly. But if we at CDC do not have the authorities to compel those data come to us and we are responsible for the official counts that are reported to us, we can’t do it by hand the way your volunteers have. We have to report what officially comes in. If it doesn’t officially come in, we can’t report it back out.  
Jessica Malaty …:Right.  
Rochelle Walens…:We don’t have those authorities and we rely on Congress in order to give us those authorities so that we can do what you did.  
Jessica Malaty …:According to the US Constitution, it is states that are responsible for public health when it comes to response to an emergency. Do you think it’s a matter of changing the 10th Amendment?  
Rochelle Walens…:I think that Congress could give us the authorities in order to compel these data. Most people actually don’t know that we don’t have these authorities. We at CDC cannot compel these data to come in. Working with Congress I think we could create authorities that would protect privacy, that would protect individuals, but that would allow us for swift and nimble public health responses that we don’t have with the data systems we have in place right now.  
Jessica Malaty …:Thank you so much, Dr. Walensky. It was a real pleasure talking to you. We’re grateful for your transparency and for spending this time with us.  
Rochelle Walens…:Thank you so much for all you do. Much appreciated.  
Al Letson:That was Dr. Rochelle Walensky, former director of the CDC. Just a few days after this interview first aired in 2023, Dr. Walensky resigned suddenly from the CDC. It was less than two and a half years after she started the job. It’s one of the shortest runs for a CDC director in decades. The announcement came as a surprise to many in public health. In a written statement, Walensky said, “It is with mixed emotions that I will step down.” She was replaced by Dr. Mandy Cohen, who’s been in that role for more than a year now. We tried to speak with Dr. Cohen for this story, but the CDC denied multiple interview requests. So where are we now? Did the big reset happen? I have Jessica in the studio today to dig into those crucial questions. Hey Jessica, how you doing?  
Jessica Malaty …:Good, Al. How are you?  
Al Letson:Good. Tell me what’s changed at the CDC in the years since we first aired the series? Have they learned anything? Have we as a country learned anything or are we going to be in the exact same place when the next global pandemic comes?  
Jessica Malaty …:Yeah, it’s a fair question and I think hindsight is 20/20. It’s a lot easier to look back and say, “Oh, this was an obvious thing that we should have done,” or this was a good thing we did, or this was a mistake. I think Dr. Cohen and the CDC are very aware of the many missteps that happened of how political persuasion and pressure influenced a lot of decisions. I think that they’re very much aware that trust is necessary to restore. It’s going to take a long time to do that, and I think they’re in this long haul of repairing that trust. But it’s going to take a long time for most folks to have that kind of confidence that this is the premier public health agency of the world. I think it’s probably going to take years of repair work to do that.  
Al Letson:Have the data collection systems improved since the pandemic?  
Jessica Malaty …:Not really. After we released the podcast, the CDC announced this new data dashboard in which they were going to be publishing a summary and they were going to combine all of the viral respiratory illness findings from COVID-19, plus influenza, plus RSV to help folks understand that some of the mitigation efforts, the ways to prevent these viruses are similar, but these viruses are not the same. They may be similar in some degrees, but there is seasonality with flu and RSV like there isn’t with COVID-19, and there are complications with COVID-19 that are not the same as with RSV and with flu. While I understand that this may be easier from a data tracking perspective, from a public health perspective, it’s really frustrating to be honest.  
Al Letson:So the general attitude around the country seems to be that the pandemic is over. COVID must be gone, but obviously that’s not true. I mean, just in my immediate circle, I know of six or seven people that have had it in the last couple of weeks, but we actually have some numbers to know that it is spiking, right?  
Jessica Malaty …:Correct. Earlier in the pandemic, I think the closest thing to a real-time indicator was data we got from hospitals around the country. We used to have a lot of hospitals that were actually compelled to report this data. That’s no longer the case, and so we’re operating on a limited number of data from a limited number of states that are telling us that hospitalizations are increasing. Now we’re certainly not seeing the amount of hospitalizations as we’ve seen in the past or even the amount of deaths, which is good. That’s in part due to immunity in the population and vaccines. But we’re still seeing a lot of people get sick. People are still dying of COVID and long COVID is still a threat. Again, I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but COVID is not leaving us.  
Al Letson:Yeah, if COVID is still here, I would say that horse is very much alive, so please keep beating it. It’s so complicated because everything is political now. Maybe it’s always been political, but it just feels like COVID is such a hot button issue that it’s really hard to make policy around it when you have to worry about the politics around it.  
Jessica Malaty …:It is very political. The decision to end the public health emergency was a political decision and it was a financial decision. Unfortunately the CDC had to kind of bend the knee to the White House and acquiesce to a transition and attitude and a transition of risk tolerance. We’ve seen it in everything. We’ve seen it in the almost disappearance of mask wearing. We’ve seen it in the very low vaccination rates each fall. We’ve seen it even in the fact that COVID is not behind us and it probably never will be Al to be honest.  
Al Letson:Yeah, this is something we’re just going to have to learn to live with.  
Jessica Malaty …:Exactly.  
Al Letson:What about the bird flu? We’re seeing some animal to human transmission. Is the CDC responding in a way we can feel secure about or are we looking down the barrel of another global pandemic?  
Jessica Malaty …:This is a really tough situation Al, and sadly, we are seeing many of the mistakes from early COVID being repeated now. We’re seeing slow communications, definitely not enough testing, not enough data transparency, lots of confusion and distrust among some of the most affected populations like farm workers. It’s a bit messy. The unique thing about this challenge is that it’s not just CDC that we’re looking to, it’s also USDA, an entity that’s not usually tasked with this type of real time public comms beyond food safety issues, so it’s complicated. If you’d asked me in 2019 what I thought the next pandemic would’ve been, I probably would’ve guessed H5N1. The good news is though it doesn’t seem to be likely to happen anytime soon, and there’s a technical reason for that. Part of it is it’s not spreading from human to human. But like we talked about last year, viruses mutate as they spread, and so we really need to reduce that transmission between animals and between animals to humans.  
Al Letson:Jessica, I love talking to you, but you always scare the daylights out of me.  
Jessica Malaty …:I don’t mean to. I will say, again, we are not looking down the barrel of an imminent pandemic right now.  
Al Letson:All right. I’ll take that ray of sunshine. Thanks Jessica.  
Jessica Malaty …:You’re welcome.  
Al Letson:Our lead producers for this week’s show are Artis Curiskis and Kara Ohler. Michael I. Schiller edited the show. Jessica Malaty Rivera is the series host. Thanks to production assistants, Max Maldonado, Corey Suzuki, and Arushi Sahejpal. Thanks also to the COVID Tracking Project at the Atlantic where it all began and the oral history team there. This series was funded in part by Tableau from Salesforce. Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Score and Sound Design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando my man Yo Arruda. They had help from Catherine Steyer-Martinez and Aisha Wallace-Palomares. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Artis and Kara co-executive produced and reported this series. Our theme music is by Kamarado Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by listeners like you. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.  

Jessica Malaty Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator. Her specialty is in translating complex scientific concepts into impactful, judgement-free, and accessible information for a diverse audience. From 2020-2021, she served as the Science Communication Lead for The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Currently, she is researcher and doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health where she is focused on pandemic and infodemic trends.

Between her day jobs and being a mother to three little kids, she also dedicates several hours a week to promoting science literacy and debunking misinformation on social media.

For two decades, Kara Oehler has been leading groundbreaking work at the intersection of journalism, documentary art and technology. Her Peabody award-winning work has aired around the world on shows like Radiolab, Morning Edition and Reveal; been published in The New York Times Magazine; and exhibited at MoMA in New York.

Oehler is executive director of the Institute for Interspecies Sound & Society, a new center being incubated at metaLAB (at) Harvard and Freie Universität Berlin. This interdisciplinary community of practice will bring together sound-based scientists, journalists, scholars and media artists to expand research impact, build new research tools and decenter humans in public culture. Oehler has also built multiple institutions to further the field of documentary arts, including co-founding UnionDocs, one of North America’s leading centers for documentary arts; metaLAB (at) Harvard; Zeega; and Mapping Main Street, a collaborative project launched with NPR to document the 10,466 streets named Main Street in the United States.

Oehler co-led the reporting team and long-term care dataset at The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Artis Curiskis is an assistant producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. Before that, he produced and reported the Peabody-nominated series The COVID Tracking Project podcast with Reveal and led data reporting efforts with The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. He was also an artist-in-residence at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and a Thomas J. Watson fellow. You can reach him at acuriskis@revealnews.org.

Michael I Schiller has worked for the Center for Investigative Reporting since 2013 as a multimedia reporter, producer, and creative director. His work spans radio, animation, visual design, and documentary film. The Dead Unknown, a video series he directed about the crisis of America’s unidentified dead, earned a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, national Edward R. Murrow Award, and national Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. His animated documentary short film The Box, about youth solitary confinement, was honored with a video journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, a San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award, and a New Orleans Film Festival special jury prize, and it was nominated for a national News and Documentary Emmy for new approaches.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.