Lauren Frayer
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.
Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.
In Europe, Lauren chronicled the economic crisis in Spain & Portugal, where youth unemployment spiked above 50%. She profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. From Paris, Lauren reported live on NPR's Morning Edition, as French police moved in on the Charlie Hebdo terror suspects. In the fall of 2015, Lauren spent nearly two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.
Farther afield, she introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.
Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.
On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.
Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.
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In just the past week, India has seen its COVID-19 cases jump by 2,646,526 — a figure that, if it stood alone, would make India the 14th worst-hit nation in the world.
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Scientists, funeral directors and survivors say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures.
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The number of new COVID-19 cases in India has hit another record. Now the State Department is urging Americans to leave.
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India's COVID-19 caseload plummeted to record lows in February. Now a startling spike is causing health systems — and possibly law and order — to break down. What went wrong?
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India is the world's largest vaccine producer. But hundreds of its clinics have closed after running out of vaccine — just as the country sees a new spike in infections.
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India has recorded its biggest jump in new coronavirus infections since the pandemic began. Authorities are trying to balance curbs on movement with voting in state elections.
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India is the world's biggest vaccine producer. It's also where the coronavirus is now spreading fastest. Infections are surging across South Asia.
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Wednesday's death toll was 354. Scientists are investigating what's making cases of infection rise precipitously after a decline last fall. "This race is really against time," says one immunologist.
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NPR tours the factory of the world's largest vaccine maker: Serum Institute of India. It's manufacturing nearly 100 million doses a month of the Oxford-AstraZeneca formula and exporting them globally.
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India's homegrown COVID-19 vaccine has been controversial because the Indian government approved its use before clinical trials showed it works. Now data is finally out.