In the reporter’s fantasy version of how the world works a journalist writes a story, the governor reads it, calls the White House, and solves the problem. Never happens. Except maybe it did over this past weekend.
In this week’s Maine Sunday Telegram I broke a story on how a massive backlog in the certification of positive Covid test results by Maine authorities had resulted in Maine getting a much smaller share of a scarce lifesaving treatment for the disease, because it artificially lowered the state’s 7-day new case rate. The next day, Governor Janet Mills’s office announced they had called the White House over the weekend to alert them to the problem and the state would be receiving nearly a double ration of the monoclonal antibody.
It’s not clear if the extra treatments from the US Department of Health and Human Services were a one-off thing or will persist in weeks going forward.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.