Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhhhue.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I'm catching up with Howard Sclamberg, a lawyer at the firm of Arnold and Porter,

and former deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

He's an expert in the drug supply chain, and we spoke about the threat that the

novel coronavirus poses to access to medications for all patients. Let's listen.

Howard, thanks so much for joining me. Could you start by explaining what your most recent

role of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was? Sure.

Thank you for having me.

I was Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy.

Very long title, but basically I oversaw FDA's inspection function and its foreign offices

and its regulation of the supply chain and some other things as well,

like recalls and imports.

So explain what the supply chain is.

Well, the supply chain, like it sounds, is all the components that make up a finished

dosage form of a drug. So the drug that you end up taking or that you end up

getting administered. And the drug supply chain in many ways is not different from the supply chain

...