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.edu.

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

Today, I speak to Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine

at the University of California at San Francisco,

Dr. Gandhi is a vaccine optimist. She'll explain what that means. She also shares her latest insights

about masks. Let's listen. Dr. Gandhi, thank you so much for coming back to the podcast. I want to

talk to you today primarily about vaccines. When you look at

what's going on with vaccines, are you filled with optimism or are you filled with concern given,

for example, the variance and some of the issues about whether vaccines could soon be rendered obsolete by mutations in the virus.

I am filled with incredible optimism because I keep on thinking that we got to these vaccines really quickly in comparison to any other pandemic.

So March 11th, WHO said this is a pandemic. November 9th, we got the first press release of a safe and effective vaccine from Pfizer.

And we've just been getting press release for publication since now of seven vaccine candidates.

I am really, really hopeful and optimistic that these vaccines will get us through the pandemic.

So let's talk about the basis for your optimism. So one reason for your optimism is the results

from the large clinical trials? Yes, one reason for my optimism was really across all six

phase three clinical trials. Let's just focus on one outcome here.

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