Welcome to Season 4 of Plenary Session.

I'm Dr. Vinay Prasad. I'm an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and I'm a practicing he-monged doc here at UCSF.

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And with that, let's start the show.

I'm back in plenary session.

I'm joined by Dr. Cody Meisner.

He is the chief of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts University. He's a member of the Verbeck Committee, the FDA Advisory Committee on Vaccines. Dr. Meisner, it's a pleasure to get to speak with you. Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here today. You know, I've been following your writings with great interest over the course of the pandemic,

and I have always appreciated you being a staunch defender of the interests of children,

which is your specialty, but also I think so very important in these times.

I've listened to you on a number of podcasts. I've read a number of your editorials,

and I was going to take a stab at trying to summarize some of the broad points that you want to make clear to the audience and see how you feel about that summary.

One point I think you want to make clear is that you were somebody who still worries, but you worried even early on, that the impact of prolonged school closure on children will be very negative on their future, their future outcomes, and that the harms of that intervention may have exceeded the benefits, very likely by a couple orders of magnitude.

I share that belief. One of the other points that you've made, I think, rather eloquently, is that you are a supporter of the idea that at the current moment,

children between the ages of five and 11 and their parents and their pediatricians should be

able to offer a vaccine. You support the offering of it. At the same time, you've been reluctant

to support a mandate for it. You think that would be premature. And we can talk about the evidence base.

So I think it would be a mistake to say that you were opposed to the approval. You are not.

You support having it as available option. You may be critical of any sort of brute force policies to mandate it in order to go to school, for instance.

And then I think the last point is I think you want to make it very clear that there is still considerable nuance and uncertainty around that decision.

So those are the three sort of general themes I've heard you say many times.

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