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 jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, the podcast asks why

it's been so hard to make certain types of decisions during the pandemic. The dean of New York

University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public

Service, Dr. Sherry Glead, joins Dr. Josh Sharstein to talk through three key steps in the policy

making process. Let's listen. Professor Glead, thanks so much for joining me. You have been

thinking a lot about a challenge that's been obvious to all of us during the

pandemic, how to make decisions for what are called non-pharmaceutical interventions,

such as closing bars and restaurants or wearing masks or how far apart kids should sit in school,

all these decisions during the pandemic, you've been thinking about how

those decisions get made. That's right. And one important thing to think about there is that we have a

really well-established way of making those same kinds of decisions around pharmaceutical

interventions, right? We've got the FDA, and it's got a way of doing that. But around non-pharmaceutical

interventions, we're in a different space. So what have you noticed from the beginning about how those decisions have been made before we get

into perhaps how they could be made better?

Right.

So I think one of the things about how decisions around non-pharmaceutical interventions have

been made is that the problem is actually much more complicated than the problem with

...