Hey there, it's Sanjay. You know, I've been receiving so many questions about vaccines

and children. So I wanted to take a moment and just share a fascinating conversation I

had recently with Dr. Vivek Murthy. He's the surgeon general of the United States. We were

talking about children in COVID-19 and the mental and the physical and the emotional

tolls of the pandemic. We are both dads. My kids are a little bit older than his, but we've

both been concerned about these topics almost since the very beginning of the pandemic.

And of course, it's been additionally on people's minds lately, with CDC's big announcement

about vaccines for children five and up. My conversation with Dr. Murthy was part of the

Citizen by CNN 2021 conference. I hope you find it as interesting and as informative as I did.

This is Chasing Life.

Vivek, Dr. Murthy, welcome. I can call you Vivek. We've known each other for a long time. Please

call me Sanjay. We have Sanjay. Great to see you. The news of the week is this authorization of

the vaccine for five to eleven year olds. And I know Vivek, you have a five year old son.

You've talked about him a lot. You've already said you plan on getting him vaccinated

understandably. But I want to talk through this a little bit because I think it's important.

How did you approach this decision? Was there anything that gave you pause?

Well, Sanjay, it's a really important question. And I think you, as a fellow parent and millions

of other parents out there know, the most important thing to all of us as parents is the health

and safety of our children. So I thought about this decision not as surgeon general, not as a doctor

but first and foremost as a father. And a couple of things that I wanted to really think about. One is

what's the toll of this pandemic on my child? How much risk is he at? And there, you know, it is

pretty sobering if you look at the numbers. I've seen the disruption in his life in school with

...