For many doctors like me, Donald G. McNeil Jr.'s byline will always inspire respect. A New York Times (NYT) reporter since the 1970s, he first earned his medical stripes in the 1990s as a foreign correspondent covering HIV/AIDS in South Africa. After returning home in 2002, he lobbied for an unprecedented beat.
"You've already got two MDs covering things Americans die of," he told science editor Cornelia Dean. "Why don't I cover the diseases poor people die of?"
Five years later, interest bloomed after McNeil and his colleague Celia Dugger co-authored a series on diseases hovering on the brink of eradication but never quite disappearing. Among other honors it won the Grand Prize in Journalism from the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center. Hunting for story ideas, McNeil started attending meetings of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (where he and I met) and wrote hundreds of articles about vaccine-preventable diseases and tropical infections. Then COVID-19 appeared, and his early recognition and forceful warnings that it threatened not just China but the entire world drew even more attention.
A year later came a bolt from the blue: his forced departure from the NYT because, in 2017, he had repeated a racial slur uttered by a high school student while leading an NYT-sponsored trip to rural Peru. McNeil's controversial ouster was followed a month later by a lengthy, public rebuttal. Since then, he has written op-eds for The Washington Post focused on policies of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, despite his divorce from the NYT, his was the most prominent byline among reporters who shared the paper's 2021 Pulitzer Public Service Medal for pandemic coverage. In 2024, his book, "The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics," was published by Simon and Schuster.
