I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. This is a Saturday special.

So the headline from the president's speech last night was that he's directing all states to allow anyone 18 or

older to get in line to receive a COVID vaccine by May 1st. We'll get reaction to that and more

COVID news from the last few days, including the strikingly positive new findings about

vaccine effectiveness coming out of Israel from Dr. Lena Wend, emergency physician,

professor at George Washington University, contributing columnists for the Washington Post,

CNN medical analyst, and former Baltimore Health Commissioner. Dr. Wynn, always great to have you.

Welcome back to WNYC. Thank you, Brian. Great to join you as always.

What do you think of universal eligibility by May 1st?

States have been trying to prioritize up until now based on risk factors. That's right. So I am very

excited, actually, by President Biden's announcement yesterday about this idea of having open season,

the open eligibility for anyone, any adult

American by May 1st. I think that that illustrates a level of confidence in the vaccine supply

and distribution. Because if we think about it, there are three major barriers to achieving herd immunity.

Supply of the vaccine, distribution and administration, and then vaccine acceptance.

So President Biden must be confident enough that we have enough supply and ability to get out the vaccine.

And they have done a tremendous job in ramping up distribution.

And so I think, again, this is exciting news.

I am concerned about vaccine hesitancy and even more so vaccine complacency, if you will, that,

you know, I think we tend to think about it as the anti-vaxxers, but I actually think that

there are a lot of people who are not actually anti-science, anti-vaccine, but they may need an additional push, an additional incentive to get them to get the vaccine. And I think that's going to be the major challenge. But May 1st for a lot of people to do their own planning, as in people who are thinking, I don't fall into one of these high-risk groups. When can I begin to

sign up to get a vaccine? Not that you're going to get a vaccine necessarily on May 1st,

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