I’ve been at Vox since Future Perfect, our section devoted to tackling the world’s most important and unreported problems, launched in 2018, and I am incredibly grateful to all of you — our readers — for what it has become. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of our old articles, asking myself, what holds up? What did we do best? What did we get wrong?

It’s a sober sort of accounting, because while I think we got a lot of stuff right that no one else did — our 2018 and 2019 coverage of the importance of preventing the next pandemic holds up particularly well — I am never quite sure if it mattered. The way that we learned we were right, after all, is that a pandemic happened, killing millions and devastating our world in a way that will take a long time to recover from.

It’s not generally considered the job of journalists to prevent catastrophes. But if there is anything we could have written that would have made the Covid-19 response actually work — to contain the virus early, or better target measures to keep people safe — that would have mattered more than anything else.

I’m in this reflective........

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