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 jhhhu.edu.

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

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, we are again turning the podcast over to our guest host, Dan Gorenstein, a long-time

health reporter and host of the podcast, tradeoffs. The topic today is why workers in nursing

homes and long-term care facilities are declining COVID-19 vaccines. Dan talks with Tracy, a staff

member at a long-term care facility, about her experience with having COVID-19, her hesitancy to get vaccinated, and what contributed to her final decision about whether or not to get the vaccine.

Gorenstein also talks with Dr. Jasmine Travers, an NYU nursing professor, about the pros and cons of mandates and incentives

and how longstanding mistreatment of frontline workers in these facilities have contributed to

distrust and feeling unvalued and invisible. They discuss possible solutions and a way forward

in protecting this critical workforce.

If you like this episode, check out the tradeoffs podcast at www.org. On that note, we're passing

the mic to Dan. Let's listen. The coronavirus has devastated nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

The death toll in nursing homes across New Jersey continues to rise.

In the first week of November, new cases tied to nursing homes surpassed 24,000 according to

136,000 people. People who either lived or worked in long-term care facilities are now dead.

...