I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, March 31st.

The good news and the bad news about COVID just keep on coming and will keep trying to help you make sense of it and how it affects

your life choices and more. Some of the good news this week is very, very good. This morning's

COVID headline, have you heard this yet, is that Pfizer vaccine trials on 12 to 15 year olds

are turning out 100% safe and effective. Teenagers rarely get 100 on anything. And of course,

so do clinical trials, 100% safety and effectiveness for 12 to 15-year-olds. For adults, now that the

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been out in the real world for a few months and not just in clinical

trials, Studies published

this week show them being 90% effective at preventing getting the disease at all. The trials just

focused on hospitalizations and deaths, which they prevented totally. The finding of 90%

effectiveness also against even becoming an asymptomatic carrier, is really good news.

At the same time, cases and hospitalizations are once again on the rise as more state and local

governments open more things. Yesterday, we played that widely shared clip of CDC director,

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, saying she has a feeling of impending doom.

Here's 20 seconds more of her emotional appearance on Monday.

So I'm speaking today, not necessarily as your CDC director, and not only as your CDC director,

but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while

longer. I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just

almost there, but not quite yet. Dr. Walensky on Monday. And a survey of epidemiologists

in 28 countries finds two-thirds believe the current vaccines

will become ineffective within a year, almost a third predicted ineffective in nine months or less.

And these are just the last two days' worth of headlines as scientists continue to keep

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