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.

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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Roggers.

Today, COVID vaccines for kids.

Dr. Erica Prohaska is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins.

She joins Dr. Josh Sharfstein to talk about how COVID affects children and the benefits and risks of vaccination in 2025.

Let's listen.

Dr. Erica Prohaska, thank you so much for joining me again here on Public Health on call.

I reached out to you because I know you are a specialist in infectious diseases in children,

and there's been a lot of discussion lately about COVID in children and whether the vaccine is

necessary. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Good. I think it would be helpful if you reminded me and our listeners what you were up to during the

pandemic. Sure. So I started as a general pediatrician in 2019. And as someone can recall, you know, the pandemic started soon after that. So I was working

as a general pediatrician at the very beginning of the pandemic, but prior to the pandemic,

even starting had already been accepted to start a pediatric infectious diseases fellowship

at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which I did start

in the summer of 2020. And then the majority of my fellowship, which was more advanced training,

specifically in pediatric infectious diseases, was during the pandemic. Also during the pandemic,

I had my second child, my first child was born right before the pandemic started. So I had the experience

of being, you know, a physician taking care of children during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as

...