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 jh.hu.edu for future podcast episodes.

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

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Nicole Brambela, a reporter in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,

about how COVID-19 has impacted the Amish and Mennonite communities there. They discussed a large

outbreak that happened early in the pandemic and the challenges associated with convincing the

community to be vaccinated. Let's listen. Nicole Brambila, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me. So Nicole, you cover the Amish and Mennonite communities in Lancaster,

Pennsylvania for the local newspaper. And you've recently written a really interesting story

about their relationship with COVID-19. So first, I guess, please describe the community

for us for those of us who aren't completely familiar. It's one of the largest, if not the

largest in the United States. They can be identified fairly easily driving their horse and

buggies. And in fact, they attract a lot of visitors every year to come and take

tours and take buggy rides. So it's a community that is, I'm struggling for the word here,

they're not isolated, but they are separate from the larger Lancaster County community. And they're

a huge source of revenue in terms of the

...