Hey everybody, we got the gang together.

Andy Slavitt and Lori Garrett, with whom we've been talking COVID since early 2020,

a little over a million American deaths to go.

But it's over.

The official COVID emergency in the United States will be declared over on May 11th. Annie Slavitt, whom you'll remember, led the Center for Medicare

and Medicaid for the last two years of the Obama administration. And during the first four

months of the Biden administration was

the senior advisor to the White House COVID response team during that time vaccinating

140 million Americans. Giving some perspective on where Americans are right now, Andy says during

our conversation, very early in the conversation, he says that two years into the

Spanish flu, a century ago, that people just had had enough of it and stopped taking precautions

about not getting sick and that the third year year they had the greatest number of fatalities.

So speaking of fatalities now, Lori Garrett, whom you may remember, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism.

That is an amazing Pulitzer. And she writes regularly for foreign affairs

magazine. So we have a Lori on an explain thing. Lurie explains

that a sizable majority of Americans who will be

dying of COVID in the next year will be people in red areas

of red states.

There are still almost 20% of Americans who have not been vaccinated.

I have to think my audience is vaccinated and boosted and will continue to get boosted.

Right now, COVID is almost all. it's uniformly the Omicron variant and

that is what the Vax is now and the booster. So get boosted if you haven't. It's not 100%.

...