246 - Do Pandemics Really End? What We Know From the 1918 Flu and a Brief History of Vaccine Resistance
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Even after the 1918 pandemic supposedly "ended" a significant number of people continued to die from "flu-like illnesses" for years. So do pandemics really "end" or do they fade from the public's consciousness? Medical historians Jeremy Greene and Graham Mooney return to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about how we really mark the "end of a pandemic", why today's vaccine hesitancy is strikingly similar to resistance to smallpox inoculations a century ago, and the hope that a focus on health disparities due to structural racism—not individual behaviors or innate characteristics—will endure through whatever the "end" of COVID-19 looks like.
KEYWORDS: health equity; racial disparity; health communication
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:19.6 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence |
| 0:22.4 | and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists, |
| 0:27.8 | community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas |
| 0:34.4 | or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question |
| 0:38.7 | at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:41.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.2 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. |
| 0:51.1 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Graham Mo Mooney, and Jeremy Green, two Johns Hopkins |
| 0:55.8 | historians. They discuss how the 1918 influenza pandemic ended and what that can tell us about |
| 1:02.2 | the future and of how vaccine resistance has been part of the culture as long as there have |
| 1:07.0 | been vaccines. Let's listen. Graham, Mooneyoney and Jeremy Green, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:13.8 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:14.9 | Thanks for having us here, Stephanie. |
| 1:17.0 | So, Jeremy, I want to start with you. |
| 1:19.9 | I want to talk about how pandemics end. |
| 1:24.0 | I know we're not quite near the end yet, but I'm curious. |
| 1:29.3 | I understand that 1918 got a lot worse before it got better. |
| 1:33.3 | So can you tell us a little bit about that process? |
| 1:37.3 | So it's really important to focus on the stories we tell ourselves about ends of epidemics. |
| 1:43.3 | We're much better at talking about |
... |
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