Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhh.edu.

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

Today, our topic is vaccine distribution.

I'm speaking with Michael Frazier, the executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

We talk about the challenges states are facing in setting up massive vaccine distribution programs

and what it will take to get more life-saving vaccine to the people who really need it.

Let's listen.

Mike, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast to talk about vaccine distribution.

When did you and your colleagues at the state health departments realize the kind of challenge that vaccine distribution would be?

Well, thanks for having me, Josh.

You know, vaccine distribution has always been on our minds. I think it was mid-summer when we first, you know, started thinking about what it was going to take to roll out this monumental activity.

And that's when we started really thinking about what resources,

states and territories would need to effectively do community vaccination.

And our advocacy agenda started pretty much in the summer, early fall, to push for those

resources for states.

So what were you asking for? What did you imagine states needed?

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