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.edu.

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

Hey listeners, this Lindsay Smith Rogers.

And today, who should get the COVID vaccine this fall?

Dr. Fiona Havers is an infectious disease physician

and an alumna of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

with deep expert in vaccine policy.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

she led the COVID hospitalization tracking system

that informed vaccine recommendations at the CDC.

Let's listen.

Dr. Fiona Habers, thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health On Call. How are you doing?

I'm doing okay. It's been a tumultuous week in public health, but I appreciate you having me on the show.

Well, thank you for coming. And I ask you to come to talk about an issue that I know is very much on people's minds, which is COVID vaccination this fall.

For a long time at CDC during the pandemic, you worked on the recommendations related to COVID vaccination. Is that right?

Yes, I oversaw COVID-NET, which was a hospitalization tracking system that looked at who was getting hospitalized for COVID and their characteristics, and that data was used to inform who should be recommended for getting COVID vaccines. And one of the important points here is that when the vaccine was approved, there was a whole bunch of data about how well it worked right at the beginning

for people who had never had COVID. But now most people have had COVID, so it's a somewhat

different question about whether vaccination makes sense. It is a different question. And I think

at the beginning of the pandemic, there was no population level immunity.

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