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

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.edu.

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

This is Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks all things COVID with Johns Hopkins

virologist, Dr. Andy Peckosch. They discuss when to get the newest COVID vaccine, why we've had

such a big summer wave of cases, and how we should think of COVID's place in our lives since it's

clearly here to stay going on five years since it first

appeared. Let's listen. Andy Pecoch, thanks so much for joining me. Oh, always a pleasure to be here.

So, of course, we have to talk about COVID, right? Somehow, COVID is everywhere again. The first most

important question is, there's new vaccines coming out.

So talk to me, what are they?

Who should get them?

Yeah.

So back in June, the FDA made a decision that allowed the two MRNA vaccine makers for

COVID vaccines to generate a vaccine based on the KP.2 variant, which at the time was one of the

major ones that were circulating. And so that's the vaccine that is actually rolling out as we speak

into pharmacies and should be available within the next couple of days for people to take.

As is always the case,

it's never a perfect match with the circulating variants because the vaccine is stopped in June so they can make the vaccine, but the virus keeps on infecting people. It keeps on mutating. And so there

are different variants now that have a couple more mutations compared to

...