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 jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, a look at the overall state of vaccine support in the U.S.

Michael Osterholm is one of the founding members of the Vaccine Integrity Project,

an initiative by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University

of Minnesota to safeguard vaccine access by elevating scientific evidence.

He joined Stephanie Desmond to talk about his work to combat misinformation around

vaccine safety and effectiveness, and he unpacks the most recent meeting of the CDC's Advisory

Committee on Immunization Practices. Let's listen. Mike Osterholm, thanks so much for joining me.

Well, thank you for having me. I wanted to talk to you today about vaccines, and I know that's a huge topic that you spent a lot of time on.

But just as a citizen in this country and the last few weeks, I feel like knowing the vaccines are one of the greatest advances ever made in public health, that trust is falling so low that it's hard to know where to go for good

information anymore. What's going on? Well, I think first of all, we want to put this into some

perspective. I agree 100% with you. This has been by far one of the greatest advances in public

health, a history of humankind. Probably the only other thing that is more significant or

of some significance was the fact of providing fresh water, sewer treatment plants,

etc., helping to eliminate many of the enteric diseases that we worried about. But as far as,

if you look at just the last century alone, the millions and millions of lives that have been saved because of

vaccines, even counting in the early part of the 20th century smallpox, which killed almost 300

million people in the 20th century, and it was only here for the first years of that 20th century.

...