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 jhh.edu.

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

Today, I speak with Dr. Julie Gerberting, former director of the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention, and now an executive vice president of the pharmaceutical company

Merck.

We speak about her perspective on the pandemic,

how Merck is working to keep its operations moving forward,

and the looming threat of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

Let's listen.

Dr. Gerberding, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

You were the CDC director from 2002 to 2009, which was a period that included the SARS outbreak.

And you did a great deal about the national and global level to call attention to global health security. So I just wanted

to start with a general question. What do you think as you think about the COVID-19 pandemic?

Well, when I look back on the 2003 SARS outbreak, what I realize in retrospect is that we did not

create an antiviral treatment or a vaccine that crossed the finish line.

And here we are 17 years later, and we would have been in much better shape if those products

had actually crossed the finish line in the ensuing years. So I think when we think about

...