Jason Beaubien
Jason Beaubien is NPR's Global Health and Development Correspondent on the Science Desk.
In this role, he reports on a range of issues across the world. He's covered the plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, mass cataract surgeries in Ethiopia, abortion in El Salvador, poisonous gold mines in Nigeria, drug-resistant malaria in Myanmar and tuberculosis in Tajikistan. He was part of a team of reporters at NPR that won a Peabody Award in 2015 for their extensive coverage of the West Africa Ebola outbreak. His current beat also examines development issues including why Niger has the highest birth rate in the world, can private schools serve some of the poorest kids on the planet and the links between obesity and economic growth.
Prior to becoming the Global Health and Development Correspondent in 2012, Beaubien spent four years based in Mexico City covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. In that role, Beaubien filed stories on politics in Cuba, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the FMLN victory in El Salvador, the world's richest man and Mexico's brutal drug war.
For his first multi-part series as the Mexico City correspondent, Beaubien drove the length of the U.S./Mexico border making a point to touch his toes in both oceans. The stories chronicled the economic, social and political changes along the violent frontier.
In 2002, Beaubien joined NPR after volunteering to cover a coup attempt in the Ivory Coast. Over the next four years, Beaubien worked as a foreign correspondent in sub-Saharan Africa, visiting 27 countries on the continent. His reporting ranged from poverty on the world's poorest continent, the HIV in the epicenter of the epidemic, and the all-night a cappella contests in South Africa, to Afro-pop stars in Nigeria and a trial of white mercenaries in Equatorial Guinea.
During this time, he covered the famines and wars of Africa, as well as inspiring preachers and Nobel laureates. Beaubien was one of the first journalists to report on the huge exodus of people out of Sudan's Darfur region into Chad, as villagers fled some of the initial attacks by the Janjawid. He reported extensively on the steady deterioration of Zimbabwe and still has a collection of worthless Zimbabwean currency.
In 2006, Beaubien was awarded a Knight-Wallace fellowship at the University of Michigan to study the relationship between the developed and the developing world.
Beaubien grew up in Maine, started his radio career as an intern at NPR Member Station KQED in San Francisco and worked at WBUR in Boston before joining NPR.
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Google and Apple teamed up on using smartphones to track coronavirus infections. But the systems are only available in a few states, where they're being used by a tiny percentage of the population. -
The U.S. has hit another grim milestone in the pandemic. As of Tuesday, 200,000 people in the country have died because of coronavirus, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
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Some camps that managed to successfully keep the virus at bay this summer are now offering a refuge from the virus — to those who can afford it — where students can live and attend classes remotely. -
Coffee has remained widely available on supermarket shelves even though COVID-19 has been particularly bad in some of the world's largest coffee-growing nations. -
They're up-and-coming nations. They're regional political powers. And they're especially vulnerable to the impact of the pandemic.
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The Trump administration notified the United Nations Tuesday that the U.S. is withdrawing from the World Health Organization. NPR discusses what it could mean for the WHO to lose its largest donor.
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The administration wants to channel more funds through the State Department in an effort to target emerging diseases. Critics say that could have dire impacts on the children of the world. -
The scientists are still studying the ways the coronavirus spreads, months into the pandemic. And one of the biggest questions is who can spread the virus.
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Researchers cast a backward look to see what might have happened during the first months of the coronavirus crisis without any preventive measures.
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When it comes to controlling the spread of the coronavirus, stay-at-home orders work. Two new studies published in the journal Nature say millions of lives have been saved worldwide.
