Donald G. McNeil, Jr., was for 25 years The New York Times' first specialist in global health. Starting with AIDS in South Africa in the 1990's, he covered AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, SARS, MERS, flu, polio, guinea worm, smallpox, mpox, dengue, Chagas, sleeping sickness, elephantiasis and many other diseases. In 1999 and 2000, articles he wrote about Africans dying because they could not afford AIDS drugs and Indian companies that could make those drugs cheaply if only the import laws would change led to the price of those drugs dropping from $15,000 per year to less than $100 a year. That radical price drop made way for the emergence of Pepfar, the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and the President's Malaria Initiative. Those entities have since saved more than 30 million lives.

In 2020, McNeil was the first reporter to argue loudly that the novel coronavirus then circulating in Wuhan, China was going to become a pandemic that would circle the globe and kill millions. He was the lead reporter on the pandemic for the Times until February 2021, and his articles and appearances on The Daily were part of the reason it won the 2021 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service. In early 2021, McNeil became briefly famous as a victim of "cancel culture," forced out by the Times after a confrontation with students two years earlier while on a "Travel With the Times" trip to Peru.

Since leaving the Times, McNeil has written a book about pandemics, The Wisdom of Plagues, and has become a regular op-ed writer for the Washington Post, mostly about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s impact on the American healthcare system. Among the awards he has won, besides contribution to the Times' Pulitzer: Columbia's John Chancellor Award (only one journalist a year gets it), a 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award and medals from GLAAD, the Overseas Press Club, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists.