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, Stephanie Desmond talks to Zeke Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania health policy expert,

about whether the U.S. is putting the needed

resources into ensuring that people are protected from any new variant of COVID-19, studying

the effects of long COVID, and getting ready for the next pandemic. Let's listen.

Zika Manuel, thanks so much for joining me. It's my great pleasure. Thank you for having me.

So we're sitting here in a situation two years into the pandemic.

And the United States state of emergency for COVID is expiring next week.

And we are also seeing that there's not money in the budget to pay for things like vaccines and testing going forward.

So talk to me about what the picture looks like today.

Well, I think the picture is that everyone hopes the pandemic is over and is behaving almost as if the pandemic is over. You've got the airlines wanting to

get masking off airplanes and out of airports. You've got people taking their masks off,

cities, states, removing their public health measures. You similarly have, a mood in Congress of let's move on,

let's get this behind us. Where behind us also means we forget that we need to invest to sort of

reduce the chances of anything bad from a future pandemic or this pandemic having another

variant that's a serious concern like Delta or Omicron.

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