News and Happenings

One Million COVID Deaths, Who is Accountable? (with Trump Coronavirus Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx)

A post-Roe America could become a reality soon, if Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling becomes the court’s final decision. From the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Robin Marty tells Andy how the decision would impact her patients from day one, and urges Americans with privilege to consider how far they’ll go to protect the rights of others. Andy asks Columbia Law School professor Carol Sanger which of Alito’s arguments stuck out to her and what people can do today to help bring the right to choose back to states that may lose it.

Early on in the pandemic, people of color were nearly twice as likely to die from COVID-19. Those health inequities weren’t surprising to Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, who was among the first public health officials in the nation to demand her state of Michigan collect race and ethnicity data on COVID patients. In fact, solving them has been her life’s work. Now the chief health equity officer at CVS Health, Joneigh tells Andy where her passion for improving the health of underserved communities stems from, including her own personal experience being dismissed by doctors, and the tangible ways the health care system can do better.

Many parents with young children have one question: When will my kid be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine? They got one step closer to an answer this week, when Moderna filed an Emergency Use Authorization for a vaccine the company says is safe and effective for kids ages 6 months through 5 years. FDA Commissioner Robert Califf tells Andy what’s holding up approval, why getting the dose right is so critically important, and whether rumors that the FDA would wait for data on a three-dose vaccine from Pfizer before clearing a two-dose vaccine from Moderna are true.

For decades, the messenger RNA (mRNA) platform was seen as too unstable and expensive to be used in vaccines or therapeutic medicines. That changed when the COVID-19 pandemic sparked enough urgency, resources, and money to bring about a breakthrough. Andy speaks with Uwe Schoenbeck, the chief scientific officer for Pfizer’s Emerging Science & Innovation team, about what makes the mRNA platform more nimble than conventional methods and its potential future uses, including a game-changing flu vaccine and gene editing therapeutics for cancers, Alzheimer’s, and HIV/AIDS.

Some passengers ripped off their masks in jubilee while others froze in horror when airlines across the country announced mid-flight that a Florida judge had struck down the CDC’s travel mask mandate last week. What does this ruling mean for air travel and daily commutes on public transit? Andy speaks with epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina about why you should keep your mask on and how to minimize your risk while traveling amid unmasked passengers. And global health law professor Lawrence Gostin explains what could happen if the justice department’s appeal makes it to the Supreme Court.

What if we could take the best of what we learned from the pandemic to build a better and more equitable health care system? What would it look like? That question is at the center of Andy’s conversation with CVS Health’s Executive Vice President Alan Lotvin. Alan envisions a future where the expertise of pharmacists and nurse practitioners is better utilized to help aid the labor shortage. And he believes wearable health technology could become as essential as your wallet, leading to fast, convenient, and personalized health care without stepping into a doctor’s office.

Andy sits down with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who is cautiously optimistic that a vaccine for children under 5 will get approved by June and a variant-specific vaccine that better protects against Omicron will be approved in the fall. Albert stresses the seriousness of Long COVID, comparing its severity to cardiovascular diseases. And Andy traces a throughline between the harrowing journey of Albert’s parents, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, and the CEO’s own journey racing the clock to create a vaccine to save lives.

While COVID caseloads are decreasing in many parts of the United States, many people who have been afflicted throughout the past two years of the pandemic are still suffering with what is commonly called “Long COVID.” COVID-19 isn’t the first virus to cause long-term illness, but Andy digs into what we know — and don’t know — about these lingering symptoms. In Andy’s conversation with two experts — Yale’s Akiko Iswasaki and Mount Sinai’s David Putrino — we’ll learn more about hypotheses for why certain people don’t recover fully from the virus, how Long COVID differs from a lingering infection, and what rehabilitation techniques seem to be working best.

Andy talks with disaster expert Juliette Kayyem about how to prepare for scary and unpredictable things, from hurricanes to cyber attacks. As the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Intergovernmental Affairs, Juliette accepts that disasters will happen and helps people, companies, and governments “fail safer,” as she puts it. She explains to Andy why a Russian cyber attack on U.S. soil would likely come in the form of an oil, gas, or water disruption. Putting in some hard work now, before the next bad thing happens, will leave you more prepared and empowered when it does.