On Contact: Virus

RT

On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the coronavirus with investigative journalist and author, Nina Burleigh. “There are many ways to begin to tell the story of why more Americans died of Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, than in any other nation on earth,” Nina Burleigh writes in her new book ‘Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic’. “We could start at the Washington, DC hospital with doctors amputating the lower leg of the White House chief of security, a man who caught Covid in Donald Trump's mask-free domain. Or we could talk to the families of forty-six veterans who died within days of each other in a Veterans Administration nursing home in Alabama. Or we could listen in on a therapy session with some of the New York City medics struggling with PTSD after helplessly watching some of tens of thousands of people die in a matter of weeks. Since the story involves mass death, religious zealots, and the worst case of government malpractice in the history of the United States, I chose the biblical opening: ‘In the beginning, there was the State. And the ideologues said, Let it Be Smashed. And so it was smashed.’” Nina Burleigh was the national politics correspondent for Newsweek and is the author of several books, including ‘The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox’ and ‘Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women’.