Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

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

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, I'm talking with

Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo from the Center for Health Security about the Delta variant and what it means for vaccinated and unvaccinated people around the world.

Let's listen.

Dr. Nuzzo, thank you so much for joining us today.

We're going to talk about the Delta variant.

Last weekend, the WHO released a statement urging that fully vaccinated people continue to wear masks and practice social distancing.

One official even said, people cannot feel safe just because they've had the two doses.

They still need to protect themselves.

This seems to run counter to a lot of the messaging that vaccines are so effective.

So how can we think about this?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement. I think that statement is issued in a

global context where there are incredible disparities in terms of access to vaccines. But, you know,

if you're someone who's fully vaccinated and you're living in a place where the case numbers continue

to fall because, you know, there's a high vaccination coverage, I personally would feel safe going maskless

in those circumstances. We know that vaccines are incredibly good at preventing people from

...