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, Stephanie Desmond

talks to Lawrence Goston, a Georgetown University professor and public

health expert. They discuss the ethical obligations that the United States has to the rest of the

world in helping to end the COVID-19 pandemic by providing vaccines globally to those who don't

have them. Let's listen. Larry Gostin, thanks so much for joining me.

Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

So today I wanted to have you on to talk about vaccines, COVID vaccines.

But I really want to talk to you about what they mean in the global sense.

And I know we've seen a pretty chaotic rollout here in the United States

in terms of a huge demand right now, which is outstripping supply for the moment. But I want to talk

about really what our ethical duty is to the rest of the world. So I wonder if you could talk to me

a little bit about where we are globally and why it matters so much what's going on elsewhere.

Yeah, I mean, I believe that the United States and other rich countries have an ethical duty, a very high ethical duty to ensure equitable distribution of the vaccine worldwide.

But I think it's not just the morally right thing to do,

but I actually think it's in our national interests to do it. But we don't quite see why,

...