John Heilemann talks with Marie Brenner, Vanity Fair writer-at-larger and author of the new book, The Desperate Hours: One Hospital's Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic's Front Lines. The book provides a detailed account of the struggle of New York’s largest hospital system, New York Presbyterian, to combat the brutal Covid-19 surge in the initial months of the pandemic. Heilemann and Brenner discuss the divide between the corporate side of New York Presbyterian, which put a gag order on its personnel, and the medical professionals who wanted to tell the truth about the city’s, the state's, and the federal government's unpreparedness in the fight against COVID; the difficulties New York Presbyterian faced because of the Trump administration’s anti-science rhetoric; and the heroism of hospital employees as the pandemic raged on. John also takes Marie for a walk down memory lane and through her storied career in journalism, focusing on three stories she wrote that were adapted into critically acclaimed films (The Insider, Richard Jewell, A Private War); her experience writing about the late Marie Colvin, the legendary war correspondent; and Brenner's run-in decades ago with Donald Trump, who was so enraged by a profile she wrote about him that he took revenge on her in a public, scene-making, cowardly, incompetent -- all of which is to say, perfectly Trumpian -- fashion.
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