Our daily digital ThinkIns are exclusively for Tortoise members and their guests.

Try Tortoise free for four weeks to unlock your complimentary tickets to all our digital ThinkIns.

If you’re already a member and looking for your ThinkIn access code you can find it in the My Tortoise > My Membership section of the app next to ‘ThinkIn access code’.

We'd love you to join us.

In a searing letter to the director of the US Centers for Disease Control, one of his predecessors lamented "the violation of every lesson learned in the past 75 years that made the CDC the gold standard for public health in the world". The argument is that federal agencies could and should have taken charge of the US Covid response in all 50 states and led the world by example instead of allowing 200,000 deaths. But is it fair? And can the damage be repaired?

Editor: Giles Whittell, Editor and Partner, Tortoise

Sensemaker Live is hosted in partnership with Santander

Our invited experts include:

Gayle E. Smith is the President and CEO of the ONE Campaign. She served as a top advisor on development issues for two American presidents and is one of the world’s leading experts on global development. Smith had previously served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for development and democracy at the National Security Council, and as special assistant to President Clinton and senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council.

Nicolette A. Louissaint, PhD, serves as executive director and president of Healthcare Ready, a 501(c)(3) organisation that focuses on strengthening the United States’ healthcare supply chain preparedness and response before, during and after natural disasters and disease pandemics. Prior to this role, during the height of the Ebola Epidemic of 2014, Nicolette served as the Senior Advisor to the US State Department’s Special Coordinator for Ebola.

Julia Belluz, Senior Health Correspondent, Vox. Julia is Vox’s senior health correspondent, currently based in Vienna, Austria. She reports on medicine, science, and global public health across platforms and media.Before joining Vox, Julia was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT. Her writing has appeared in a range of international publications, including the BMJ, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist and Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, the Globe and Mail, the LA Times, Maclean’s, the National Post, ProPublica, Slate, and the Times of London. In 2015, she contributed a chapter to the book To Save Humanity: What Matters Most for a Healthy Future.

How does a digital ThinkIn work?

A digital ThinkIn is like a video conference, hosted by a Tortoise editor, that takes place at the advertised time of the event. Digital ThinkIns are new to Tortoise. Now that our newsroom has closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, we feel it’s more important than ever that we ‘get together’ to talk about the world and what’s going on.

The link to join the conversation will be emailed to you after you have registered for your ticket to attend. When you click the link, you enter the digital ThinkIn and can join a live conversation from wherever you are in the world.

Members can enter their unique members' access code to book tickets. Find yours in My Tortoise > My Membership in the Tortoise app.

If you have any questions or get stuck, please read our FAQs, or get in touch with us at memberhelp@tortoisemedia.com

Read our ThinkIn code of conduct here.

What is a Tortoise ThinkIn?

A ThinkIn is not another panel discussion. It is a forum for civilised disagreement. It is a place where everyone has a seat at the (virtual) table. It’s where we get to hear what you think, drawn from your experience, energy and expertise. It is the heart of what we do at Tortoise.

How we work with partners

We want to be open about the business model of our journalism, too. At Tortoise, we don’t take ads. We don’t want to chase eyeballs or sell data. We don’t want to add to the clutter of life with ever more invasive ads. We think that ads force newsrooms to produce more and more stories, more and more quickly. We want to do less, better.

Our journalism is funded by our members and our partners. We are establishing Founding Partnerships with a small group of businesses willing to back a new form of journalism, enable the public debate, share their expertise and communicate their point of view. Those companies, of course, know that we are a journalistic enterprise. Our independence is non-negotiable. If we ever have to choose between the relationship and the story, we’ll always choose the story.

We value the support that those partners give us to deliver original reporting, patient investigations and considered analysis.

We believe in opening up journalism so we can examine issues and develop ideas for the 21st Century. We want to do this with our members and with our partners. We want to give everyone a seat at the table.