Two timely specials are airing – or re-airing – this week:
– “Asian Americans Battling Bias: Continuing Crisis” is Wednesday (March 31) on the CBS News network, at www.cbsnews.com/live, with Elaine Quijano hosting. It’s at 6 p.m., 8 p.m. and midnight ET (3, 5 and 9 p.m. PT) and will air on the Smithsonian Channel at 10 p.m. Easter Sunday (April 4).
– CNN will rerun “COVID War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out” with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (shown here, pre-pandemic) from 8-10 p.m. ET (5-7 PT) Friday on CNN.
The CBS show is a follow-up to one in October. The title is the same (except for adding “Continuing Crisis,” but it will have new reporting by senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang and other Asian-Amerocan reporters, plus two roundtables.
The CNN hour aired Sunday, with Gupta separately interviewing key doctors, including Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Deborah Birx and Stephen Hahn.
Birx described what she considered a chilling call from President Trump, who was angry that she warned of the pandemic worsening in the Midwest. Redfield, the former CDC director, was alone in two views – that the virus may have started in a lab, then escaped by accident … and that the main reason Americans had a disproportionately high toll is that we are less healthy and more obese.
He struggled with questions about the five-week delay in available testing … at a time when the World Health Organization already had a test available. Gupta showed a clip of the WHO chief saying that the U.S. simply never asked for its test.