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 team up to talk about vaccine mandates.

Today, we chat with Professor Nancy Cass, a leading ethicist at Johns Hopkins.

I'm guessing she is an opinion on whether vaccine mandates are ethical.

Let's listen.

Today we're continuing our conversation about vaccine mandates.

And today we're going to take it from the ethical framework. Nancy Cass is our guest,

and Josh Scharstein will be joining us. Thank you both so much.

Thanks, Stephanie. Great to be here. So I'm going to jump right in. It's great to have you here,

Dr. Cass. And I want to ask this first question from the perspective of someone who really is opposed

to vaccine mandates.

Because in a way, when they are arguing against them, it comes off like an ethical argument

that it's wrong for them to be required to be vaccinated.

What would you describe as the ethical basis for that and how should we think about the strength of that argument?

Yeah, it's a great question. So in public health, we know that a lot of different things work

to improve the public's health. And yet, we often try to educate people to create conditions that increase the chance

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