Public Health On Call Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Who should get a bivalent booster? How effective are they? How should people space out shots after infection, original strain boosters, and a host of other combinations of immunity and exposure? Can you get a bivalent booster and a flu shot at the same time and are there any benefits to spacing them out? How long did it take for us to get these boosters, and what’s the hope for longer-term immunity? Virologist Dr. Andy Pekosz talks with Stephanie Desmon about bivalents and answers listener questions sent to publichealthquestion@jhu.edu.

Pandemic disruptions led to serious learning loss in K-12 education, and new research shows just how serious. Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, talks with Stephanie Desmon about what the data shows in terms of student performance, why these historic declines will have impacts for years to come, and what can be done to start closing the gaps.

A 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out irrefutable evidence that medications like methadone can save lives when used for opioid use disorder, but decades of policy rooted in racism and stigma keeps methadone largely out of reach for those who need it. Alan Leshner, CEO emeritus of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chair of the planning committee for the report talks with Lindsay Smith Rogers about these policies and why this is a moment of opportunity to enact major reform in the methadone system and address the opioid epidemic. Read the full report here.

Malaria, a mosquito-borne infection, affects some 228 million people globally each year, killing over 400,000 of them—primarily children under the age of 5. In part two of a miniseries, Thomas Locke, host of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute podcast “Malaria Minute” looks back at 1955 when the WHO launched its “Global Malaria Eradication Programme” that was expected to end malaria worldwide in five years. What went wrong, and where are we now in terms of efforts to fight back against one of the world’s most entrenched diseases? You can learn more about groundbreaking malaria research at malaria.jhsph.edu.

How effective have federal vaccine mandates for COVID-19 been? Will litigation impact other vaccine requirements, such as those for school attendance? What might happen during future pandemics? Michelle Mello, a professor of law and public policy at Stanford, talks with Stephanie Desmon about the mixed success of COVID vaccine mandates. 

Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security returns to the podcast to talk with Josh Sharfstein about the current state of COVID. They discuss the pandemic situation in the US and around the world, and how they are managing their own lives at a moment when it seems like most people are ready to move on.