NY Times hires Jewett to cover FDA

The New York Times has hired Christina Jewett to cover the Food and Drug Administration.

Jewett has been a reporter Kaiser Health News. Before that, she was at the Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica and The Sacramento Bee.

Her first job was as a crime reporter at The Bee, and it led her to health care journalism. While covering the case of a patient at a psychiatric hospital who had died after a worker held her down by kneeling on her back, Jewett dug into the hospital and public records. When she moved to ProPublica, she and a colleague investigated lapses in care at the chain of psychiatric hospitals that owned the one she had written about in Sacramento.

At the Center for Investigative Reporting, she and colleagues won a George Polk award in 2011 for a series about unethical billing practices by a hospital chain that later paid $65 million in a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2019, at Kaiser Health News, she uncovered a huge trove of hidden company reports of harm from medical devices. Her series ultimately led the FDA to release more than 5 million records and won a Bartlett & Steele Gold Award. Last year, she was the lead investigative reporter on a joint project by Kaiser and The Guardian on the horrific toll of COVID on health care workers.