275 - How a Former Twisted Sister Roadie Is Getting Thousands of People Vaccinated Every Day
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2021
⏱️ 16 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Baltimore County's mass vaccination sites—called "PODs," which stands for Point of Dispensing—can serve up to 500 patients an hour. The logistics of moving so many people safely through a space are complicated, but Terry Sapp, the public health emergency coordinator for Baltimore County, is drawing on his years of experience setting up venues for the heavy metal rock band Twisted Sister. Sapp talks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about crowd control and the human psychology behind successful PODs and, yes, the jokes he hears—"As far as COVID vaccines, we're going to take it...and we want you to take it too."
KEYWORDS: vaccine distribution; pandemic response
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 at jh.h.edu. |
| 0:41.1 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:47.7 | We're not going to take it. |
| 0:50.9 | We ain't going to take it. |
| 1:04.0 | We're not going to take it anymore. Today, I speak to Terry Sapp, the public health emergency coordinator for Baltimore County, Maryland. Terry is responsible for running the large vaccine distribution sites in the county, which are called pods. |
| 1:10.0 | Before this job, Terry set up the |
| 1:12.5 | venues for the heavy metal rock band known as Twisted Sister. Coincidence? Not at all. Let's listen. |
| 1:21.8 | Terry Sapp, it is so great to have you here on the podcast. I want to ask you first, how long have you been preparing |
| 1:30.0 | to create pods to distribute critical vaccines, medications to people in Baltimore County? |
| 1:38.0 | Well, I started here in Baltimore County in 2008 and pretty much started working on pod planning right away since that's one of the key |
| 1:47.2 | metrics that we're responsible for doing for our grant but really i didn't have a whole lot of time |
| 1:53.6 | of preparation because in h1n1 came along in 2009 and so that kind of was the foundation of our pods in Baltimore County for mass vaccinations. |
| 2:04.4 | And we've been preparing for the next big thing ever since then. So we've been doing annual |
| 2:09.9 | mass vaccination exercises every year since H1N1. So while the rest of us have been living our lives for the last dozen years, you have |
| 2:20.3 | been thinking about pods pretty much every day you go to work. Would that be fair to say? |
| 2:26.2 | I would say every day, but pretty close. I'd say definitely every flu season. So we use the flu season |
| 2:31.8 | as our opportunity to hone our craft and test some of our plans and keep that muscle memory with all of our staff. |
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