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.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

With vaccinations rising and cases declining in the United States, what comes next?

How do we turn progress into the end of the pandemic? Today, Dr. Josh Sharfstein speaks to Dr.

Crystal Watson and Dr. Caitlin Rivers, senior scholars at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

to find out. Let's listen. Dr. Crystal Watson, Dr. Caitlin Rivers,

thanks so much for coming to talk to me.

Our topic is what it will take to really put an end to the pandemic.

We're seeing a lot of progress with vaccinations,

but we're also seeing signs that vaccinations alone on the current

pace that we're on may not be enough. I'll start with you, Dr. Watson. When you see the numbers

these days, what are you thinking about the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States?

I'm very encouraged by the level of vaccination that we've seen so far, especially in older populations.

I think we see a really clear negative correlation between high vaccination rates and infection

rates and specific age groups.

...