Tamara Keith
Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. Keith has chronicled the Trump administration from day one, putting this unorthodox presidency in context for NPR listeners, from early morning tweets to executive orders and investigations. She covered the final two years of the Obama presidency, and during the 2016 presidential campaign she was assigned to cover Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association.
Previously Keith covered congress for NPR with an emphasis on House Republicans, the budget, taxes, and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time.
Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world, from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues, and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake, and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived of and solely reported "The Road Back To Work," a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.
Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member station KQED's California Report, where she covered agriculture, the environment, economic issues, and state politics. She covered the 2004 presidential election for NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and opened the state capital bureau for NPR Member station KPCC/Southern California Public Radio to cover then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited, and distributed for nine years.
Keith earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is part of the Politics Monday team on the PBS NewsHour, a weekly segment rounding up the latest political news. Keith is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game.
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The president's team has roped in community groups across the nation to try to persuade their neighbors to get a COVID-19 vaccine. And when it comes to rural America, there's a lot of work to do.
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With a more contagious variant now dominant in the U.S., the country's genomic surveillance capacity is getting a major boost. -
The pause of administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could affect the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., especially since it's so practical for rural areas.
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The Biden administration isn't sold on the idea that hot spots should get more doses, despite growing calls from local leaders. Instead, states get a weekly supply based on their populations.
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The Biden administration is under pressure to change the way it allocates COVID-19 vaccines to states to make sure that areas seeing surges in cases get more doses.
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The Biden administration plans to loan millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada. But there's pressure for more vaccine diplomacy in the global race against time and variants.
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The United States will loan millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — not yet approved for emergency U.S. use — to its closest neighbors.
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A focus group of 19 Trump voters became less skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines over two hours. But they said they wanted to hear from doctors, not the former president.
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Nearly half of Trump voters say they don't plan to get vaccinated for COVID-19. The race is on to find pro-vaccine messaging that connects with vaccine-skeptical white Republicans.
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A 15-minute call with J&J executives on a Sunday afternoon stretched into a 75-minute turning point. "We have to take bold action and overwhelm this," a senior official said.
