Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with Dr. Danny Avula, who recently stepped down after a year of service as the

vaccine coordinator for the state of Virginia. What was that job like?

Let's listen.

Dr. Avula, thanks so much for joining me on public health on call.

You were the Virginia State vaccine coordinator for the COVID pandemic.

That's right.

Prior to 2021 was serving as a local public health director in Richmond, Virginia, and January 4th got a call from the governor's office asking me if I would run point on the vaccination rollout.

And two days later was being introduced at the governor's press conference.

So that's a pretty big responsibility.

Absolutely.

I think it's probably will be the most impactful thing I ever do in my career,

but it was an incredible experience.

And yeah, learned a lot.

And I think the team just was incredible and saved, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

So let's dig into it.

You're at the press conference with the governor.

...