Welcome to Season 4 of 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 Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging 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.

This week, Stephanie Desmond and I are finding people for some interesting conversations about

vaccine mandate.

Today, we speak to Dr. Lisa Marigakis, the senior director of

infection prevention at Johns Hopkins. She's leading the implementation of a vaccine mandate for all

Johns Hopkins personnel. We'll hear why Johns Hopkins decided to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine

and how it's going. Let's listen.

Hello, Stephanie. Good to talk to you again about vaccine mandates. And hello, Dr.

Marigakas. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So, Stephanie, we talked about wanting to find an example of an organization that is actually putting into place a vaccine mandate, but we didn't have to look very far.

No, we didn't. We looked in our backyard right here at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I'm really

curious to know about sort of, I know that there were very low rates of immunization among

certain medical professionals, and I'm curious how that's changed. So Dr. Marigakas, walk us

through, first of all, the decision to mandate vaccination

and explain the policy that Johns Hopkins has.

You know, at Johns Hopkins Medicine,

we have a long history that predates the pandemic

...