Earlier this week, the Biden administration made an announcement about COVID.

The White House is putting an end to the COVID public health emergency.

A threat to Biden administration's emergency declaration will end on May 11th.

This is the country it looks to get away from treating COVID as a national crisis,

and instead go toward treating it like a seasonal illness.

The U.S. has been in public health emergency mode since late January of 2020,

and the move to wind that down over the next few months will put an end to many of the free

things, tests, vaccines and treatments that Americans have gotten used to.

It's also a way for the administration to get ahead of two GOP bills that would end the

emergency declaration right away, and provide an orderly off-ramp for hospitals and healthcare systems.

Without question, the country has vastly more tools to fight COVID than it used to,

and more than half of us, according to one recent survey, have already had the virus,

which raises the question of what, if anything, COVID is leaving behind in our bodies.

That's why I wanted to talk to Tim Recwarth.

Tim's a science journalist, and he recently wrote a story for Slate titled,

What is COVID actually doing to our immune systems?

In part, because people in his life wanted to know.

There's been some stuff circulating on various social media platforms about how it's

potentially destroying, quote-unquote, humanities immune systems, and that was a very compelling concern

for people, because it could come from potentially even mild infections, and so they were like,

hey, what's the deal? What's really going on here? And that's what spurred the interest for me.

So today on the show, is COVID changing our defenses against other illnesses?

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