Christiane Amanpour is a journalist at CNN. Donald McNeil Jr. is a science writer for The New York Times. She asks him questions about the virus. He gives informed yet blunt answers.

Three minutes on how our federal government screwed this up.

Less than three minutes on our testing shortfall (Warning: our president says words during the first thirty seconds, so be careful).

Even less on the difference between medicine and public health (Mr. McNeil doesn’t discuss how the president and his minions sabotaged our preparedness by cutting budgets and firing qualified people; it would have been good to hear McNeil speak bluntly about that).

Update:

The Times issued a statement saying Mr. McNeil “went too far in expressing his personal views”. His editors discussed the issue with him and reminded him that “his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions”. There are some things corporate journalists are not supposed to say in public, even though they say such things in private and what they say is true.