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 jh.h.u.edu.

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

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, the producer of Public Health on Call.

Thank you for joining us for Vaccine Week on the podcast.

Today, Josh Sharfstein speaks to Carla Grossenbacher, an expert in employment law. Can employers mandate that their employees be

vaccinated against COVID-19? Should they? Let's listen. Kela Grossenbacher, thank you so much

for joining me. Now, you're an employment lawyer.

Could you explain a little bit about what your job entails?

Sure.

I'm a partner at Seiforth Shaw, and I'm the chair of the labor and employment practice in our Washington, D.C. office.

So I counsel employers on compliance with employment loss and I defend claims made against

employers by employees. And recently in COVID times, I've been doing a lot of advising on

matters like COVID testing and COVID vaccines for employees in the workplace because of my workplace privacy expertise.

So let's talk about the vaccine. What kinds of questions do employers bring to you about the

COVID vaccine? They want to know whether they have the legal right to mandate it. Then they want to know

should they mandate it. And probably most. Then they want to know, should they mandate it? And probably

most importantly, they want to know what every other employers are doing on the situation.

...