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Hi, listeners. It's Lindsay Smith Rogers. And today, a change to COVID vaccine recommendations.

I speak with Sarah Daypre, an expert in

immunization policy, about Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s announcement that the COVID vaccine

will no longer be recommended for healthy children or pregnant women. Let's listen.

Sarah Dayprey, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call.

So a quick question to start you out with.

How long have you worked on vaccine policy?

Yeah, so I've been in the space for over 25 years, which scares me.

Dates me.

But yeah, I first got engaged on the vaccine policy side in 1998 when I joined

the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which I'm working for Congressman Henry

Waxman, who was the ranking minority member at the time. And the committee was launching an

investigation into the relationship between vaccines and autism. What's old as new again. So I started learning about

vaccine policy then and spent about 13 years on Capitol Hill during the ECA, working on vaccine

policy issues. And then I left the Hill and worked in public health advocacy for about 10 years.

During that time, I served on the HHS

National Vaccine Advisory Committee and also shared the board of a nonprofit called Vaccinate Your Family,

which is, as the title suggests, heavily engaged in vaccine advocacy and education. And then I spent

...