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.hu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, guest host Dr. Sara Bennett talks with Dr. Chizoba Woonodi, the Nigeria County Director

for the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

and Dr. Anita Shet, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and senior scientist in the Department of International Health.

They discuss the impact of COVID-19 on immunization systems across the world. Let's listen.

Dr. Shet and Dr. Winodi, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast today.

I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting us, Dr. Bennett.

Thanks for having us, Dr. Bennett.

Some of the other podcasts in the series have looked at how COVID-19 is crowding out other types of health services.

And today we wanted to focus on how it was affecting immunization programs across the world.

Dr. Sheck, what do we know to date about how the new coronavirus is affecting immunization programs?

This is a very important topic.

I'm so glad you brought it up.

This pandemic has resulted in disruptions in so many aspects of our lives.

And around the world, we're seeing that essential health services have been paused,

and immunization programs have been disrupted,

...