The Press Box - How to Cover COVID With Dan Diamond

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Bryan is joined by The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond to discuss covering COVID-19. Diamond shares his experience becoming a journalist, reflects on the COVID-19 coverage since the beginning of the pandemic, and touches on the new COVID-19 variant, omicron, and the difference in coverage under Trump vs. Biden. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Dan Diamond Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Bacari Sellers podcast tackles the most pressing current events through conversations and interviews with high-profile guests. Building upon his experience in South Carolina government and politics and his experience as a lawyer, Sellers will talk to his guests about all topics from the world of politics. Check out the Bacari Sellers podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. The big story this week, I don't need to tell you, it is the Amicron. variant of the coronavirus. And we've got a very timely version of our how-to series today.

It's How to Cover COVID with Dan Diamond, ace reporter from the Washington Post. Now, if you listen to this pod, you've probably heard us mention Dan's name. You've certainly heard us mention his scoops on the COVID beat. He's had a really interesting career that started at a consulting company before he went to Politico and now the post. Anytime we talk about COVID, we reference how hard it is for experts to wrap their arms around the virus while they're still trying to understand it themselves. It's also tricky for newspaper reporters. And what I wanted to talk to Dan about today is how you report a story like the Omicron variant, which has the potential to be very scary, but could also wind up being merely medium scary, like some of the

variants that preceded it. Which experts do you rely on? How do you headline your stories? And where do you put the, for lack of a better term, killer quotes. Here's how to cover COVID with Dan Diamond. All right, Dan, when did you first want to become a journalist? I read books about journalism growing up. I read Ben Bradley's memoir. I remember that. Ben Bradley, the famous editor of the Washington Post. And then I also read a bunch of books that were just amazing journalistic feats,

going inside an industry or going inside a season. There was John Feinstein's season on the brink about Bob Knight, Indiana basketball. I thought that was incredible. Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, which I think press box listeners are familiar with. I thought that was amazing too. And I'm from Baltimore and interned at the Baltimore Sun when I was in high school. So I did think that journalism was going to be in my future, but I do remember sitting down with one Haggard Baltimore Sun reporter for lunch. I think he covered the courts. And he said, you know, Dan, this job is like being a bricklayer. I come in every day. I lay

some bricks. I go home. I come back. I lay some more bricks, which when you're 17 years old is maybe the least sexy job pitch you've ever heard. So I moved away from it and found my way to D.C. a very different way and only came back into journalism full time five years ago. What was your job in D.C.? Well, originally I came because I thought I was going to work for the government. I was in college during the terror attacks in 2001. That was really motivating to me. I wanted to be of service. I had lined up a potential government job. I was waiting on the security clearance and just landed at this health care research firm

that I ended up kind of falling in love with. It was a company founded by a guy named David Bradley, who you may know because he used the profits from that company, the advisory board to buy a magazine called the Atlantic. And the CEO of that company when I started was a guy named Jeff Zions, who you may have heard of because he's now the White House coronavirus coordinator, the new Deborah Birx, essentially. While I was there, I was journalism adjacent for a long time.

I managed some publications at that company. I wrote on the side. I tweeted a lot. I found my way into some gigs as a contributor to places like Forbes and Vox, and eventually got to a point where I felt like I had to make a choice over whether I was going to be a journalist for real or just kind of play at it on nights and weekends. You were a basketball blogger during this period? So I started initially as an anonymous sports blogger.

There's a whole crop of us guys like Shea Serrano who had a pseudonym at the time. And one TV host well-known who I think I've heard mentioned on the press box before, but I probably shouldn't say who because I've never actually confirmed it. But there was a whole crop of people inspired by Deadspin and kissing Susie Colbert. Do you remember that website? Sure. And I remember my buddies, we were big fans of it. of Deadspin and kissing Susie Colber,

or just the idea at least, of writing under pseudonyms. And I remember there were a few pieces I wrote under the pseudonym that got picked up by Dan Steinberg at the Washington Post at the time and True Hoop at ESPN. And I could see who was reading this junky little website I had set up. And one day it was someone in the New Jersey Nets office was reading my basketball analysis.

And I was like, oh my God, it's this stuff that I'm typing while sitting on my bed at, you know, one in the morning actually is resonating in the real world. So I thought maybe I could become a sports writer, but healthcare became a more going concern. President Obama pushed the Affordable Care Act. I was doing a lot of research and analysis around that. So kind of let the sports blogging mostly die, though I did end up writing a little bit for a true hoop network, kind of the broader chain of websites managed by ESPN for a while. Now, when you're sitting here in journalism adjacent, at this consulting company.

Do you have a person, everybody seems to have a person, do you have a person that says that you say, I want to write like that when I grow up? There were two. I really wanted to write like a tool Gawande. I don't know if that's someone you're familiar with, but he's a doctor who also writes three or four times a year in the New Yorker.

He won a number of national magazine awards. He wrote one of the best stories I've ever remember, he wrote one of the best stories I ever remember reading about healthcare called the cost conundrum back when the Affordable Care Act was being debated. It was a signal event. I remember President Obama assigned his whole team to read the story. It seemed like the kind of aspiration where he had a real job, but then could also pitch pieces. They would have impact. And then I also just thought Michael Lewis was amazing. I mean, you've read a Michael Lewis book. You walk away feeling like you've just seen a hero take on some industry.

It was always a compelling read. So I remember studying what Michael Lewis did to become Michael Lewis. One day I biked down to the Library of Congress just to find an old Vanity Fair article about him because I wanted to understand how he became Michael Lewis. He had been like a bond trader before becoming a reporter. I seem to remember that Vanity Fair article. I think it's by Marjorie Lewis and he got passed around when I was at the New Republic like a summies dot hate.

Have you seen this thing? Check it. Check this baby out. I think there's a reason why I had to go all the way to the Library of Congress. to find it because it's been scrubbed from the internet. It was kind of embarrassing for Michael Lewis. But it was interesting about how he really broke through. And he wrote under a pseudonym for a while at the beginning of his career. So those are two interesting ones, Gawande and Lewis, because when I think of your role as a health care reporter, what they do and did was take very,

very complicated subjects and essentially translate them into English for someone like me to understand who knows nothing about it. Is that something that appealed when you were reading them? Definitely. I thought that was going to be my skill set, that I could be someone explaining big ideas, whether at a place like Vox or Forbes, and also writing with a little bit of voice. I almost feel like Brian, I've come at it backwards. Earlier in my career, I was writing the opinion pieces really voicy. And I've had to have a lot of that hammered out at places in recent years like Politico in the Post. We stamped all the basket blogging out of you to make you into a proper reporter. Well, not totally. I did write an article about basketball for the post a few weeks ago. You did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back to the old, back to the old trait. Now, I meet lots of people like your former self who are journalism adjacent, who are doing stuff on the side, who write to me and say, I really want to get into it full time. That's what I want to do. And then they don't do it. And they wake up and they're 45 years old and they never quite did it. What got you into journalism full time?

There are probably too many small moments, but there are a couple big ones that John. about. One was the recognition that as much as I enjoyed my work at that consulting company, I ran some teams, I had wonderful colleagues, it felt a lot more secure than journalism. It wasn't as exciting as like the one piece I might write for Forbes that got picked up and passed around. I was putting so much energy into this hobby on the side that I wasn't getting paid for at the time. And then there were specific decision points. The excitement of the New York Times in 2013 when the Affordable Care Act health exchanges were being implemented. I worked with a small team at the company to track how many people were signing up for coverage.

The New York Times got really interested. I worked with a graphics editor at the Times who took all of this data that I'd been compiling with my team and put it, I think, in the Sunday paper. And it was just really exciting. But even that wasn't quite enough to get me to jump. It was only later that the work that I was doing on the side was getting more and more attention, it actually started causing tension with my full-time employer. They were worried at times that if I was taking an opinion on the Affordable Care Act or some other health care issue, we're down poorly to the company.

There was a CBS News interview I was supposed to do about the Affordable Care Act, and I was on my way to do it and got a call and was told, don't do it. You're not senior enough at the company to go ahead with it. And eventually, there was a specific moment when I got asked to write a New York Times op-ed for the Sunday review, and I was really excited about it. And my company said, no, I couldn't do it. And the day that it appeared, I remember I went to Politico, which had been flirting with me about coming on board, leaving my job and going to Politico to write a newsletter. And I went to Politico that day and said, okay, I'm interested in doing it.

That was the final straw. I've been denied this prestigious byline, and I want that prestigious byline. line. I want to write stories like that, so now I got to do it. You're the one saying prestigious, not me. I think it was more, I just wanted to write. I wanted to be able to use my voice, and I felt that I had probably gotten to the end of the road in my last job doing that. What year is this? That was late 2015. Late 2015. I started a Politico, January 2016, the day of Barack Obama's last State of the Union. So you cover the end of the Obama administration and then the beginning of the Trump administration. What's the job at Politico? Well, I think you're generous to say cover the end

of the Obama administration because honestly, I didn't know what I was doing a lot of the time. I'd never worked in journalism full time before. I'd never been in a newsroom. That was a little bit of an issue when I interviewed with Politico. I don't know if it's because I've spent half my life reading Bill Simmons, but I was trying to make the case to the editor of Politico why I, someone who'd never been a reporter, should be allowed to work there. And I said, you know, it's sort of like a basketball player who played in Europe and is trying to move to the NBA.

Like, it's not quite the same, but I've got some of the skills. You know, it's a slightly different game with different rules, but I can learn things. I don't know if that really worked, but I got the job. So I guess maybe other arguments carried the day. But that initial year, Brian, And I was asked to do things that I'd never been trained to do. I was asked to break stories, to cultivate sources.

And I'd never covered Congress before. I'd never had to write with a word count or really strict deadlines. When I was filing to Forbes or Vox, it was basically self-edited. And I could go as long as I wanted and turn in things whenever I wanted. And it was a big adjustment, and I really struggled that first year and figuring it out. How do you learn to be a reporter on the fly like that? combination of repetition, screwing up and having editors

tell you what to do better the next time. The breakthrough moment was really in 2017. So I'd been at Politico for about a year and a half at that point. Trump had taken over. I had started to get my sea legs. I had broken a couple of stories early in the Trump administration.

But later in 2017, my colleague, Rachna Pradhan, had this great tip that the health secretary at the time, a guy named Tom Price, was flying private jets. She was having problems confirming it. She brought it to me because I had sources within the administration. We both kind of ended up in the same place, which is we knew it was happening, but we couldn't prove it.

And the two of us ended up staking out airports, digging through flight records. And we broke a story in September that the health secretary was flying around the country on charter jets using taxpayer money, even going from Dulles to Philadelphia. in the span of about 10 days, that story mushroom from a curiosity to lead nightly news to Tom Price being forced to resigned by Trump. And that was sort of like getting a PhD in journalism. I got to see so many different things in those two weeks. I got to work with the senior editors at Politico day in and day out first time. I got booked on a bunch of places like Anderson Cooper and Chris Hayes, so it got to understand that side. It was overnight an education into how to break a story, how to do it responsibly, how to be terrified that you've maybe

screwed something up, so you've got to run it through the lawyers first. And after that, I feel like I really was able to lock in and my career took off. Do you remember the moment when you're able to push that story from thing we think we know is happening or we know is happening to think we can print in politico? Yes. There was a day where we had figured out that Secretary Price was flying out of Dulles. We woke up early, went out there, tried to figure out how to stake out the private airfield. We sort of missed it the first time. We thought we saw it, but didn't have a great angle on it. So Ratchett and I figured out how she was going to be driving her car at a certain time. I was going to be watching from the main terminal, and then I would

run to a different place where I could overlook the airfield. And we were able to see Tom Price, Kelly Ann Conway, some others, get out of this charter jet. We knew we had them. We had the story. We had them using this charter jet. Now, that was still a few days before we actually broke the story. We ran it through lawyers. I went to meet with a key source where, you know, I turned off my phone and rode a bike and went for a walk and finally met up with a source somewhere in D.C.

to just check our facts. So we still had more to do before actually publishing, but that was the moment where we knew we had it. literally seeing him get off the charter plane with your, this is shoe leather reporting in action right here. We're looking at records. We're doing all that stuff, but you know, we're going to witness him walking off the plane. And something I have thought about Brian is how different that story would have been if I'd been like a longtime congressional reporter who knew Secretary Price. You know, maybe we're not staking him out. I'm just giving him a phone call earlier in the news reporting. I don't know if that leads to a better story or not. But,

I'm happy with how it turned out for us. Do you remember when you first heard that COVID-19 or what became known as COVID-19 might be a big story? I remember when I first heard about it, and then I do remember when it exploded. So there were reporters who were earlier to COVID than me. Statt has a great reporter named Helen Branswell, who was on it, I think, late December 2019. I first wrote about it January 8th, 2020. I read some CDC warning about a virus in China.

I had just interviewed for a Politico podcast, a senior CDC official who ran the team of disease detectives. So I immediately reached out to her and said, hey, is this something you're tracking? And I wrote something short for our newsletter the next day. And then I just began following it from there. But it was really two weeks later or so when the first case was reported in the United States,

I had sources inside the government telling me this is spreading faster in China than we expected. This may have indeed been something that came out of a lab. And after I wrote that story, I went down to the pharmacy in the basement of the Politico building and bought a box of masks and came back up and handed it out to all the members of my team. And after that, I stopped riding the metro. I started walking to work even though it was like an hour just because I was on high alert basically until March. what changes about your professional life from that point forward? Well, I think the daily routine was very different.

We had been following all kinds of other stories that increasingly got shunted to the side in favor of COVID. I was planning this big series on Medicare for All, how it was going to define the Democrats' 2020 primary debate. That never happened. I mean, it may have happened, but I didn't write the series. And it also meant that we were competing as a health team with some of the leading reporters in the country. I remember, you know, I'm chasing these stories not just against these science and health reporters that I've been competing with for a few years, but Maggie Haberman at the Times and Jonathan Swan at Axios and Josh Dawsey at the Post. So it made it just a really

crowded and competitive field, and there were so much happening so quickly. I also think, frankly, Politica, we were not prepared for the moment. There were a bunch of tips that I remember getting and trying to pass along or turn into stories that editors weren't interested in or that we just couldn't actualize. So we had to reconfigure our own team over the course of the year just to make sure that we were moving faster to keep up with the story. We're nearly two years past that point. You wrote me in the email. Imagine covering a never-ending Super Bowl, which I take to mean this is the big story. It's absolutely what you want to be covering. but at the same time it's a completely exhausting experience

and someone experience it overwhelms your life. Is that about it? Yeah, I mean, after I sent that, I thought, you know, maybe that was a bad comparison because the Super Bowl is just one day or one week. So, you know, imagine being asked to cover like a political campaign that never ends. There's no election day. It just keeps going and going. That's being on the COVID beat.

Have you allowed yourself to take much of a vacation since then? No, but that's okay. I mean, this is what any reporter should want. This is the most important time for health reporter to be breaking news, explaining stories, actually helping people. I mean, I wrote a lot at Politico about drama within the Trump administration. I'm proud of those stories. I think they hold up. I think they help explain why the response was so screwed up in early 2020.

But those sorts of stories matter at a different level than being asked to explain what is Omicron? What are the right precautions to take and so on? You broke a big story in September 2020. You called it a highly unusual advertising campaign from the Trump administration to, quote, defeat despair about the coronavirus. How'd you get onto that story? Well, the person who actually broke that story was a colleague named Dan Lipman Politico. He had the news that this campaign was underway. But I broke some follow-up news about what the Trump team was doing with that campaign. I was covering the news coming out of the press shop at the health department.

There was a guy named Michael Caputo, a longtime ally of Donald Trump. He'd been installed earlier that year to oversee all messaging. We had broken that story. Michael Caputo wasn't happy when we broke the news of him being hired. So it was a relationship that had some ups and downs. And a few weeks earlier, I had reported that Michael Caputo and his team were trying to change CDC reports. He left HHS shortly thereafter, but we kept following this big campaign that he and his team had tried to put together. The idea was to promote conversations with famous celebrities who would help Americans feel better about the state of coronavirus.

One problem, though, was that the Trump administration was looking for celebrities who would be friendly, and they were having problems finding friendly celebrities. There was an entire document where they vetted with different musicians. and actors and others said. And then the second challenge was Michael Caputo and his team were trying to run it more like a political campaign than say a public service announcement campaign. They'd taken money from the CDC. They were coordinating it in a way that was really unusual

for any sort of health care messaging campaign. So I dug in on that and got some sourcing and it eventually ended up falling apart before the election. What's the hardest thing about COVID to convey to readers? I don't think there's one thing. It depends on the time of year. The fear that a lot of reporters have is worrying a reader who doesn't need to be panicked. But then there's also the fear that maybe you're not playing up concerns and people aren't taking the precautions that they need. I think another complication messaging the COVID story is how much the government really is to blame rightly or wrongly for things that went well or didn't go well. There were times. that I thought the Trump administration took too much blame for things that happened last year. And then there are times that the Biden administration, I think, skates by for its own mistakes. So helping people understand where do we apportion those things. That makes sense.

And in your terms of, let's talk about the sort of how much do we scare people? Because we are here, we are speaking during Amicron week. What do we know about the Amicron variant of the coronavirus right now? Well, we know more than we did a week ago, but still a lot less than we're going to know a few days from now. Amacron is a heavily mutated form of the coronavirus. And the reason it has alarmed some scientists is because of changes specifically to a part called the spike protein. We don't have to get into the science weeds, but I came up with a metaphor earlier today.

It might work. It might not. I'm going to try it on you. The vaccines and previous infection with coronavirus produce antibodies in your system. So if the real coronavirus shows up again, these antibodies kind of latch on to the spike protein and make it harder for coronavirus to get in yourselves. Amicron is built a different way, and it makes it harder for those antibodies to take hold.

Here's the metaphor. Imagine if your keys get stolen, Brian, and everyone in Los Angeles County wants to now use your keys and come to your house and throw a party. But you have an antibody named David Shoemaker, and he's going to stand outside your house, and he knows that if these people show up with these keys, he's immediately going to jump out and put some gum on the keys.

So people trying to open your door, there's gum on the key that the lock won't turn. And that works reasonably well. But with the Omicron variant, people are showing up with keys that maybe have been gum-resistant. You know, the gum slides off, so they're able to get in the front door. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other protections in place. There's an alarm system that goes off, both at your house and in the human body. There are things called T-cells that might fight off. infections, you know, think of you with like a baseball bat. But that first line of defense really

may have challenges in Amacron. And that's why people that I talk to, like Maderna's president, talk about it as a Frankenstein variant because it has a bunch of changes that will make it likely harder for current vaccines to fend off. Charlie Worsal wrote an Atlantic newsletter about this that we were talking about in the podcast. He compared Omicron to a tropical depression, to use another metaphor, that we can see out there in the ocean that has the hallmarks of something that might become a devastating hurricane, but we don't know whether it's going to be a devastating hurricane or maybe how devastating it will be. Is that a fair metaphor, do you think, where we are right now? I heard you on the podcast talk about that. I agree with that. Scientists have used similar terms with me.

Yeah, so that's about where we are. You wrote a big post story about Amacron. You were one of four co-authors of that story last Sunday. I read the story from your tweet, which read like this. From White House to vaccine plants, officials race to stave off new, quote, Frankenstein virus variant. This is the highest level of alert since 2020, Modernist president told the post. Now, the headline on the actual post story on the website was slightly more sedate. You've got to prepare for the worst. World responds to new variants arrival.

How do you decide which information to play up in headlines and which to play up in tweets and which not to play up at all? Well, I'll answer that question, but first I have one for you. You're the press critic. Was that a responsible tweet? I think so. I mean, sure made me click on the story. But what was interesting was the Frankenstein quote, which as you say comes from Modernist president, was 31 paragraphs into the story. So immediately I'm reading it. And again, this is not as a press critic, just as how afraid should I be, how serious is this very going to be. I was struck by the difference between the tweet and the story. So I got that quote from Mederna's president, and I thought, this is an easy way to simplify for the average person. They don't have to hear me do a giant metaphor about keys with gum on them. This sums it up, right? You hear Frankenstein variant, and it embodies why this is such a weird version of the virus.

It's got all these different pieces combined. I also didn't want to panic people, if it turns out, that Omicron, for all these Frankenstein mutations, maybe it ends up being relatively mild. So I didn't push for it in the headline. Even that tweet, Brian, I wondered about, but it seemed to me that Moderna's president, if this has motivated one of the major vaccine makers to spool up their operations as fast as possible, it's my responsibility as a reporter to convey that as simply as possible. Yeah, and this strikes me as just exactly what you're talking about in terms of balancing all these things at the one time. We think this could be really, really serious. But, but, but, but, and

here's another thing that makes it seem serious. Here's another thing that you should at least tap the brakes on to wait to see if it's serious. And you're trying to do that all the same time, all in one article. I've heard folks compare this week to March 2020 when there was a lot of news happening, when it felt like COVID was coming and we didn't know what to do. I actually think a better comparison is January 2020 or February 2020, where we knew that it was out there, but we didn't quite know what it meant. Now, that doesn't mean that Omicron's going to be like COVID in March 2020 and tear through. We don't know that yet. But we are sounding the alarm earlier than we did with that first wave of coronavirus. And as a result, we have a lot less

information about what will come. The good news is we have a lot better testing. COVID really snuck up on us in March 2020 because we weren't picking up these cases. which now, if you're just following the news every hour, there are new cases reported in the Washington, D.C. area, right before we got on for this call. As media outlets have tried to explain the seriousness of the various stages of COVID, they've relied on a mix of news articles, like the one we're talking about, and also newsletters.

New York Times' daily newsletter a lot of days is just David Leonhardt saying, here's what to think about the latest COVID news. What do you see is the upside and the downside of those two different formats? There are times basically every day where I wish I had a newsletter to be able to contextualize some of the reporting that I'm doing. This is actually the first time in many years I haven't had a daily newsletter. So I think newsletters have a lot of value in sorting for readers, not just the articles and tweets, but really helping them frame the day.

I do worry sometimes that newsletters, written by people who might not be in the trenches, are a little too removed from the realities of what scientists are saying. I don't know if David Leonhard or other newsletter authors are talking to people like the Moderna president or Tony Fauci, which is something that if we're writing these big stories that are going to go on the front page of the post, I have to do that. I have to get the best sourcing possible because we're doing our best to have the definitive first draft of history. Yeah, and I think, you know, the push pull we're talking about with reporters, where

you're wondering how to put things, I think I also feel that as a reader. Because some days, I just, you know, I'm having a busy day. I'm, I don't know, you know, I'm watching a basketball game. And I just want somebody in very plain English to grab me by the lapels and say, hey, you, this is what we know today. And I'm going to put it in a couple of paragraphs for you. And some days, I want the longer treatment of the kind you did last Sunday where it's like, here's what we know. Here's something else. We know. Here's something else. We know paragraph after paragraph. And to, give me the fuller picture. Yeah, and credit where it do, I think reporters, straight news reporters, can do FAQs. My colleagues have done a bunch this week. There were a couple folks from our team,

I think Fennett, Neer-Paul, Jalach, and Boggs, some others who did a Q&A with readers. I think that was yesterday. So it's not that straight news reporters can't do some of these things, but the newsletters do have more flexibility in how they do it. I also think that this might be lost on the average reader, but I'm working usually against a word count, a print length. when I'm writing one of these stories that might land on the front page. So that means I'm sacrificing a lot of context that may be a newsletter that can be as long as David Leonard wants it to be. It can go in a lot different directions than my piece can. I want to ask you about another story this week. Mark Meadows wrote in his memoir that Donald Trump

tested positive for COVID before the September 29th debate last year with Joe Biden. We found out about Trump's positive test on October 1st. Now Meadows is now doing this. Charles Barclay, I was misquoted in my own autobiography bit. But knowing what we know now, how should we look back at that period? To me, Brian, it was evocative of the entire Trump administration's COVID response. The fact that the health officials working on the national response, and I tried to reach out to all of them, Fauci, Deborah Birx, Alex Azar, the health secretary, Steve Hahn, the FDA commissioner, a bunch of others. I think I ended up talking to eat people or talking to people with knowledge of their thinking.

None of them knew about this test, they said. And the fact that there was a potential COVID exposure in their workplace, even as they're trying to fight national COVID, that is just, I mean, it sums it all up. The Trump administration's response was dysfunctional largely because of Donald Trump. I also think the breadcrumbs of how Trump carried himself over those days, people who might have been exposed by Donald Trump,

Yes, he got a second test that was presumably false, but it appears that the test he got was, it's known as an antigen test. These are not the reliable second test that you're supposed to get. You're supposed to actually go wait for a PCR test, which would take a day. So in absence of that, I'm not sure what to think about Donald Trump's initial positive test, especially given that he tested positive publicly a week later and very quickly seemed to get severe symptoms. that usually don't come on until later in the course of the infection. Now, you've been doing this over two administrations. What's the difference between covering COVID under Trump versus covering COVID under Biden?

So under the Trump administration, I had been on the beat for three years at that point. I had really good sources throughout the administration, especially on health care issues. I had a head start on this story when it happened because so many of the people that I knew or had talked to or had called. cultivated, we're working on it. It was a little bit different when the Biden administration came in, and they had put their campaign together over Zoom virtually last year. It's a lot harder to make inroads, especially because some of the officials who got tapped for the administration didn't even come to D.C. at the beginning of 2021. So I think one big change is just how much harder it's been to source in this administration. There also are a lot of officials who saw all the leaking in

Trump era and don't want that to happen under Biden. Not to say that there isn't sourcing, and I can't get senior officials on the phone or other people inside the government, but it's a lot harder and slower than it was last year. And then I also think there's a different reaction in the media. There were stories that accrued to Donald Trump, negative stories about his handling of COVID, that at times I thought weren't fair or skewed the reality on the ground. And then there have been things that the Biden administration has claimed or done that I think the media picked up and ran with and didn't bring appropriate scrutiny to at the time. Can you as an example of one or the other of those two things? Yeah.

I think the vaccine rollout late last year, the Trump administration took a lot of grief over the bumpy rollout at the beginning. They had promised that a certain number of doses would be available at a certain time. those promises get getting scaled back, the vaccine rollout kept getting delayed. Some of that was, a lot of it was beyond their control. It was the pharmaceutical companies, Moderna, Pfizer, making vaccines slower than expected. Also, the FDA wanted to put in extra protections to make sure that the vaccines were safe. The vaccine rollout plan, a lot of it was devised not by political officials, but by career officials in the CDC. So when people were mad about that bumpy rollout at the beginning. It wasn't like Donald Trump was in the White House saying, this is how many doses

should go out on whatever day. It really was career health officials who were overseeing it. And I thought it was interesting when a new vaccine was developed this year under Biden, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which had all kinds of shortcomings and bumps. None of the challenges that happened with that vaccine really accrued to Biden. Not saying that they should have, but it was a very similar scenario in terms of Johnson and Johnson promised a certain number of doses, has woefully underdelivered them. Initial administration of those doses was bad. And then the Biden administration, too, benefited from a lot of goodwill when it came into office. I remember a day after inauguration, there were headlines at CNN and elsewhere

that the Biden team was inheriting, quote, a non-existent COVID-19 vaccine plan. I think they've since updated some of those headlines. But that wasn't quite true. There were a million doses being administered to Americans at that point. The Biden team worked very, very hard to lower expectations at the beginning of its term. And I think the media sometimes ran with those political claims and didn't bet them appropriately. I want to bring up one thing that you talked about last time you're on the podcast, which is the rise of the COVID expert. If you get on Twitter, you will find lots and lots of different kinds of COVID experts. I'm not talking about media people here. I'm talking about scientists, doctors, and the like, how much variance is there between COVID experts that you see

talking to the world from Twitter? On Twitter, I think it is totally a mixed bag. Sometimes you're only as good as the number of people who retweet you, right? And in my line of work, I think some of the experts have sorted themselves out. People with bad track records I don't go to, people with better ones, I try and go back to. And I kind of know, Brian, who I need and for what story. if I need a clear big picture perspective on COVID, I might go to someone like Brown University's Ashikha, who I've known for a decade. He is an incredible communicator. He can put things in context in a really smart way. If I want a particularly sharp perspective on why Americans aren't getting vaccinated, I might go to Molly Ann Brody or Liz Hamill at Kaiser Family Foundation. There are pollsters there.

And if I'm writing about a regional outbreak, I usually look for local health, and virologists. But I also think there should be more punded accountability. And I think last time I was on you, you put me on the spot and wanted me to name names. And I didn't even realize we were doing a podcast at the time until maybe two minutes before we got on the call. So I wasn't ready. But this time I am. So. Okay. Here we go. Yeah. Well, you mentioned David Leonhardt in the New York Times, who has repeatedly quoted a doctor named Monica Gandhi. She's at UCSF. I think he even quoted her today. She's been consistently optimistic about the state of the outbreak. She's been consistently wrong. Three months ago, she said that we were in the COVID-M game. Now we are dealing with Omicron.

There's a doctor named Marty Macri, who's written a bunch of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that were similarly mistaken. He predicted that we'd be at herd immunity by April. We weren't. There is a doctor named Mike Osterholm, who's been generally a pessimist, but I do think his pessimism has been borne out more often than not. There are pundits who have track records of now a year and a half at this point. And it's incumbent on reporters like me to try and amplify the ones who are more reasonable and more accurate. And I think to stay away from the ones who keep making the same mistakes. It's so interesting because if this were happening in 2001 versus 2021, all the vetting would be done by reporters like you, right?

Or television networks. They would choose who is going to talk to America, who's going to offer their expertise in COVID and who's not. Now a lot of these people are going to get on Twitter. And as you say, it becomes real, really tempting to tweet things that will be popular, as it is for all of us, as opposed to tweeting, I don't know, whatever might be less popular. So how minus your articles and other reporters and the screen you put up, how do we tell a trustworthy COVID expert from a less trustworthy one? Given that the average reader might not have all the backstory that a reporter like me has, I look for a few. simple things. I do tend to look at institutions. So if it is a credible institution, a scientific organization that has a track record, working on virology, on COVID, I look at organizations like

Johns Hopkins. If you are finding an expert from one of those places, they are credible and vetted. They wouldn't be at those places, if not. I also think that some of the folks who are more on the fringes, at times have proven that even though they're not part of the club, they might see things and be willing to stake opinions that members of the public health fraternity sometimes are inoculated to. There was a lot of focus last year on how travel bans, travel restrictions were overblown, that they were even racist or not grounded in the data. But if you actually dig into those opinions, it doesn't appear that there's a lot of science behind getting mad about travel restrictions. If anything, there's evidence that maybe the travel restrictions do slow the

spread of coronavirus. Tony Fauci admitted as much when we talked earlier this week. There were people who were not in the academy who made that argument, and I think the fact that they weren't part of institutions that might have made it harder for them to stake that claim, they had more flexibility. Now, that doesn't help you or the listener trying to figure out who to listen to, But unfortunately, I think that's the muddle we're all in. Sometimes the experts who have been doing this for 10 years will get it completely right. And sometimes because they've been doing it for 10 years and they have their preconceived notions, they're missing what's right in front of us. All in here, Dan, to say COVID has been a politicized story would be to understate it dramatically.

How does the fact that it's politicized affect your work day to day? It's hard to find a reader who hasn't already developed priors on this. People are pretty dug in in what they're reading, what they're learning. There are lots of readers who think the COVID issues last year were drummed up to force Donald Trump from office. There are a lot of liberals who are tired of hearing about COVID. Now, the President Biden's in charge. I do know that I try and go about my fact finding and my listening to different outlets in a way that ensures that I'm always hearing from different sides. I listen to Megan Kelly's podcast.

I listen to The Ruthless Podcast by some Republican operatives. I listen to Pod Save America. I watch Chris Hayes. I want to make sure that I'm seeing all the different messages that are going out in our balkanized media environment. So you hear COVID news bubble up on that and you hear from readers by email or Twitter, things like that saying, here's what I think about your reporting about COVID? All the time.

I was on NPR earlier today. NPR, to me, is probably more of a liberal bastion than a conservative one. But there were readers who said that we were playing this up to attack Republicans. So it's a heated issue and understandably. This is a matter that affects everyone's lives, their kids' school, the possibility of going back to work. So I get why there are strong feelings, and I try never to take it personally. Dan Diamond, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me back.

I guess I really am a friend of the press box. Oh, you're super friend status now. We need to, we're coming up with new tears all the time. So feel free to slot yourself into anyone that feels comfortable. New tears like new COVIDs, I guess. Variants. Thanks, Dan. Thank you.

Huge thanks again to Dan Diamond. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. David Shoemaker and I are back Monday to whisk you through the holiday season with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.