Selena Simmons-Duffin
Selena Simmons-Duffin reports on health policy for NPR.
She has worked at NPR for ten years as a show editor and producer, with one stopover at WAMU in 2017 as part of a staff exchange. For four months, she reported local Washington, DC, health stories, including a secretive maternity ward closure and a gesundheit machine.
Before coming to All Things Considered in 2016, Simmons-Duffin spent six years on Morning Editionworking shifts at all hours and directing the show. She also drove the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014 for the "Borderland" series.
She won a Gracie Award in 2015 for creating a video called " Talking While Female," and a 2014 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for producing a series on why you should love your microbes.
Simmons-Duffin attended Stanford University, where she majored in English. She took time off from college to do HIV/AIDS-related work in East Africa. She started out in radio at Stanford's radio station, KZSU, and went on to study documentary radio at the Salt Institute, before coming to NPR as an intern in 2009.
She lives in Washington, DC, with her spouse and kids.
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Draft documents obtained by NPR show that the federal government is preparing to enforce new data reporting requirements, threatening to withhold vital Medicare funding from noncompliant hospitals. -
The Trump administration had promised complete, transparent information on the coronavirus and hospital capacity. Instead, the new system has produced erratic updates and confusing numbers.
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The Trump administration is directing hospitals to use a new platform to report COVID-19 data instead of an existing system at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Pointing to the pandemic's disproportionate toll on people of color, over 1,200 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call on the agency to declare racism a public health crisis.
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NPR surveyed all 50 states to find out how many people they have doing contact tracing — one of the essential tools for keeping outbreaks from flaring up. Look up your state to see how it's doing.
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Trump has reversed Obama-era protections that prohibit discrimination in health care based on gender identity. Critics warn the rule could harm a vulnerable group — LGBTQ people — during a pandemic.
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It's a technique widely used in other countries to slow the spread of infection. Here's how contact tracing works — and how it can help the U.S. start to get back to normal.
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We're in shutdown mode for now, but what comes next? Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is working on a plan to safely reopen the country.
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To stop COVID-19, retired doctors are signing up to take clinical shifts. Specialists, including dentists, could move to front line care. And med students are fielding calls in overwhelmed clinics.
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President Trump and Congress Friday authorized a package of emergency funding to help and treat and slow the spread of COVID-19. About $950 million is designated for state and local response.
