This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared.
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera talks with host Al Letson about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and our developing public health emergencies, including the spread of bird flu and the ongoing measles outbreaks. We’ve not only failed to learn our lessons from the pandemic, she argues, but we also might be stumbling into the next one.

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Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producers: Nikki Frick and Artis Curiskis | Interim executive producers: Taki Telonidis and Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson

Listen: The Covid Tracking Project (Reveal)

Read: Avian Flu Could Define Trump’s Second Presidency (Mother Jones)

This past weekend marked a major escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, with the dramatic detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the protests against Israel on Columbia University’s campus last year. Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, is a permanent legal resident in the US. The Trump administration says it detained Khalil for what it described, without evidence, as his support for Hamas, and President Donald Trump promised “this is the first arrest of many to come” in a Truth Social post. In the meantime, a federal court in New York prevented the federal government from deporting Khalil while it hears his case. He’s currently being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.

Khalil’s arrest—and the Trump administration’s reimagining of immigration writ large—are in many ways a product of decades of dysfunction within the US immigration system itself. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new weekly interview show, host Al Letson talks with The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about the 50-year history of the country’s inability to deal with migrants at the southern border and why the Trump administration’s approach to immigration is much more targeted—and extreme—than it was eight years ago.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Dig Deeper/Related Stories:

Did the US Cause Its Own Border Crisis? (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/did-the-us-cause-its-own-border-crisis/

Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)

https://revealnews.org/podcast/immigrants-on-the-line/

The Forgotten Origins of a Migration Crisis (Mother Jones)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/jonathan-blitzer-migration-crisis-everyone-who-is-gone-is-here-interview/

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions as president was simple and sweeping: pardoning 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. That single executive action undid years of work and investigation by the FBI, US prosecutors, and one person in particular: Tim Heaphy.Heaphy was the lead investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and he’s arguably done more than anyone to piece together what happened that day. His work helped inform related cases that were brought against rioters, Trump administration officials, and even Trump himself.In the first episode of More To The Story, Heaphy talks to host Al Letson about how Trump swept aside those consequences; the overlap between the January 6 attack and the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; and what Trump’s pardons mean for the country going forward.

Check out the Reveal episode Viral Lies, in which we dig into the origins of “Stop the Steal.”
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More To The Story team:

Kara McGuirk-Allison, Josh Sanburn, Al Letson 

Taki Telonidis, Brett Myers, Fernando Arruda, Jim Briggs, Nikki Frick, Kate Howard, Artis Curiskis

From the unflinching investigative team behind Reveal comes a new weekly podcast that delivers More To The Story. Every Wednesday, Peabody Award-winning journalist Al Letson sits down with the people at the heart of our changing world for candid—sometimes uncomfortable—conversations that make you rethink your entire newsfeed. Whether he's sounding the alarm about the future of democracy, grappling with the shifting dynamics of political power, or debating big cultural moments, Al always brings his unfiltered curiosity to topics and perspectives that go too often ignored. Because, as Al reminds us every week on Reveal, when you take the time to listen, there’s always More To The Story. Find it in your Reveal feed beginning March 5, 2025.

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