Hello and welcome to the Osterholm Update, a podcast on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases with Dr. Michael Osterholm.

Dr. Ostrome is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CIDRAP, at the University of Minnesota. In this podcast, Dr. O. Strom

draws on nearly 50 years of experience investigating infectious disease outbreaks to provide

straight talk on the latest infectious disease and public health threats. I'm Chris Dahl,

reporter for CidWap News, and I'm your host for these conversations.

Hello everyone, and welcome to a special episode of the Ostrome Update podcast.

We're here today to do what we promised we would do in our last episode, give you a quick

recap of last week's meeting

of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which meant to discuss recommendations

for updated COVID-19 vaccines, as well as two vaccines that are on the childhood immunization

schedule. We're going to start with the recommendations that were made for COVID-19 vaccines on

Friday, the second day of the ACIP meeting. So, Mike, can you lay out for our listeners

what ACIP recommended and what this discussion was like on Friday?

Thanks, Chris. As we promised last week, we would give you an update today. And I must say in sharing this update with you, I have never seen a federal agency meeting like I saw on Thursday and Friday in my 50-year career. It was remarkable in a number of different ways. First of all, I have actually seen student council meetings of high school

students run with more efficiency and effectiveness that I actually saw this meeting on Thursday and

Friday. Again, I don't say that to in any way impugned any of the individuals, but it just showed

how little preparation really had gone into the meeting in terms of understanding what was before them.

A good example was, in fact, votes that were taken in which on a hot mic, members actually said,

I don't know what we just voted for.

I mean, that actually happened.

You can't make that up.

And the questions were often when posed to the members to vote on, every individual, rather

...