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 Dr. Tara Kirksell of the Johns Hopkins Center

for Health Security about the new CDC guidelines on what vaccinated people should and should

still not do given the state of the pandemic. When can we throw away our masks? Let's listen.

Tara Kirksell, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

So today I want to talk about the guidelines that the CDC released this week,

having to do with what people who've been vaccinated should and shouldn't do

now that they are likely immune from the COVID vaccine. This seems to have

sort of given them more freedom to socialize and do their daily activities. Could you walk us

through the main points? Yeah. So I think that, you know, it was really exciting when CDC came out

with this new guidance, just because,

you know, we're expecting it. We know that we're going to be doing different things as people

are vaccinated, but I feel like it's spring again. I feel like it's one of the first steps

...