Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a health reporter on the Science desk. She was NPR's first Reflect America Fellow, working with shows, desks and podcasts to bring more diverse voices to air and online.
She's a former producer for WBUR/NPR's On Point and was a 2018 Environmental Reporting Fellow with The GroundTruth Project at WCAI in Cape Cod, covering the human impact on climate change. As a freelance audio and digital reporter, Huang's stories on the environment, arts and culture have been featured on NPR, the BBC and PRI's The World.
Huang's experiences span categories and continents. She was executive producer of Data Made to Matter, a podcast from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was also an adjunct instructor in podcasting and audio journalism at Northeastern University. She worked as a project manager for public artist Ralph Helmick to help plan and execute The Founder's Memorial in Abu Dhabi and with Stoltze Design to tell visual stories through graphic design. Huang has traveled with scientists looking for signs of environmental change in Cameroon's frogs, in Panama's plants and in the ocean water off the ice edge of Antarctica. She has a degree in environmental science and public policy from Harvard.
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The federal government has released detailed local data on where hospitals are starting to fill up with patients. Researchers and health leaders say this was urgently needed.
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A federal advisory committee to the CDC voted Tuesday on guidelines for who should get COVID-19 vaccines first. The committee decided to prioritize health care workers and nursing home residents.
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A CDC survey released in November shows that only 63% of health care workers are ready to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Concern about speed and political interference are contributing to the hesitancy.
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Operation Warp Speed is allocating the first batch of 6.4 million COVID vaccines to states, based on population. This circumvents a CDC advisory committee, which proposed allocation based on risk.
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Gen. Gustave Perna says as soon as the FDA deems a vaccine safe and effective, his team is ready to coordinate deployment of tens of millions of doses as early as next month.
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A team of independent advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a science-based outline for deploying a vaccine when it's ready. The goal is to stop deaths and viral spread fast.
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Where are hospitals reaching capacity? Which metro areas are running out of beds? NPR has learned federal agencies collect and analyze this information in detail but don't share it with the public.
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A vaccine will only work if a lot of people can get immunized. State health officials are working furiously to design outreach and distribution plans, with little clarity from the federal government.
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In a private, leaked letter, a former CDC director urges Dr. Robert Redfield to stand up for public health and stop the "slaughter" caused by COVID-19 in the U.S.
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New enforcement guidelines are now in place, pushing hospitals to comply with rigorous reporting requirements or risk losing a crucial funding stream from the federal government.