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 jhh.edu. That's public health question at jh.t.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. Today, Stephanie

Desmond talks to Bruce Leslie, president of the bipartisan advocacy group,

first focus on the children. They discussed the COVID-19 stimulus that was just signed into law,

especially the measure expected to dramatically reduce child poverty in the United States.

Let's listen. Bruce Leslie, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for inviting me.

So today I want to talk about the COVID stimulus bill.

And there is something that was sort of hidden in there almost

that could really make a huge difference on a lot of people's lives.

Could you talk to me about that?

Yes, absolutely.

So the American Rescue Plan Act, this has been something a long time coming for years we've

been working on, trying to really get the child tax credit to be made fully refundable.

There's about a third of the kids in this country.

...