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 of 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 jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with Dr. Emily Erbelding, the director of the Division of Microbiology

and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Erbelding leads a huge part of the scientific effort

in the United States against COVID-19. We speak about basic research, clinical research, and vaccines.

Let's listen. Dr. Erbelding, thank you so much for joining me. It's been probably about a decade since we

worked together in Baltimore.

And I remember you as the infectious disease expert

at the health department who knew the answer

to every question about every infectious disease that came up.

And now you're the division director

for microbiology and infectious disease at the National Institutes of Health.

Yeah. Thank you, Josh. I don't know if I knew everything, but I tried.

So you have, you left Baltimore and you went to the NIH, and now you're in this position

where you're responsible for the

work of the National Institutes of Health supporting the scientific community on COVID-19.

Could you maybe just take us back and say, what's it like to be at the NIH when there's

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