Noel King
Noel King is a host of Morning Edition and Up First.
Previously, as a correspondent at Planet Money, Noel's reporting centered on economic questions that don't have simple answers. Her stories have explored what is owed to victims of police brutality who were coerced into false confessions, how institutions that benefited from slavery are atoning to the descendants of enslaved Americans, and why a giant Chinese conglomerate invested millions of dollars in her small, rural hometown. Her favorite part of the job is finding complex, and often conflicted, people at the center of these stories.
Noel has also served as a fill-in host for Weekend All Things Considered and 1A from NPR Member station WAMU.
Before coming to NPR, she was a senior reporter and fill-in host for Marketplace. At Marketplace, she investigated the causes and consequences of inequality. She spent five months embedded in a pop-up news bureau examining gentrification in an L.A. neighborhood, listened in as low-income and wealthy residents of a single street in New Orleans negotiated the best way to live side-by-side, and wandered through Baltimore in search of the legacy of a $100 million federal job-creation effort.
Noel got her start in radio when she moved to Sudan a few months after graduating from college, at the height of the Darfur conflict. From 2004 to 2007, she was a freelancer for Voice of America based in Khartoum. Her reporting took her to the far reaches of the divided country. From 2007 - 2008, she was based in Kigali, covering Rwanda's economic and social transformation, and entrenched conflicts in the the Democratic Republic of Congo. From 2011 to 2013, she was based in Cairo, reporting on Egypt's uprising and its aftermath for PRI's The World, the CBC, and the BBC.
Noel was part of the team that launched The Takeaway, a live news show from WNYC and PRI. During her tenure as managing producer, the show's coverage of race in America won an RTDNA UNITY Award. She also served as a fill-in host of the program.
She graduated from Brown University with a degree in American Civilization, and is a proud native of Kerhonkson, NY.
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Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says that while confidence in COVID-19 vaccines has risen, there's more work to do in convincing people, especially in rural communities, to get the shots.
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Cases are up in some states, but the Biden administration's chief medical adviser says that "hopefully ... the vaccine is going to win this one." He urges continued mask-wearing and other measures. -
A year ago, as the pandemic began, fitness instructor Joe Wicks started a daily exercise class for kids on YouTube. The videos became popular with kids and their parents. Now the series is ending.
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The 168 school desks make up an exhibit called "Pandemic Classroom." Each of the seats represents 1 million children living in countries where schools have been closed for almost a year.
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How did West Virginia become one of the world's leaders in delivering COVID-19 vaccines? One piece of the story starts with a striking photograph in the local paper. -
The same electronic systems used to record when patients get a physical or go to the ER are also used to log data when coronavirus vaccines are given. But the systems don't share information easily.
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Sudden demand flooded a county website and its phone lines. So CD Davidson-Hiers found herself in the middle of the chaos, fielding calls from residents eager to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
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Todd Beckley, a funeral director in Los Angeles County, says COVID-19 deaths have overwhelmed his mortuary. It is so overwhelmed there is waiting list that's 23 families long.
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In an NPR interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease expert, said changes in vaccine distribution could be necessary depending on what happens in the next few weeks.
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The Food and Drug Administration's authorization of a COVID-19 vaccine could come in a day or two, a member of an FDA expert panel says. But he says it may be late 2021 before normalcy returns.
