I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, August 2nd.

Back with us now is Dr. Lena Wend, who has given us so much good information about COVID

during the whole pandemic.

One thing about the new CDC guidelines as background before we start, they are based in part

on a big outbreak over the last month in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.

Maybe you've been hearing about this, about 900 people infected, stemming originally from

4th of July weekend tourist crowds.

74% of the infected people were vaccinated.

79% of those vaccinated cases were symptomatic.

But now the good news, only seven hospitalizations out of 900 cases and a nice round number, zero

deaths. Dr. Lena Wend is an emergency medicine physician, George Washington University professor

and CNN and Washington Post, medical contributor. And again, her book is called Lifelines, A Doctors' Journey in

Public Health. Dr. W. W. Nguyen, thank you for everything so far during this period, and welcome

back to WNYC. Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to join you. Thank you for you all the work that

you're doing to help to educate people about what is going on with COVID-19.

Well, let's start on the news and then we'll talk about

the book. So about Provincetown, what's actually the bigger news here, the spread among so many

vaccinated people or the zero deaths and only seven hospitalizations out of 900 cases?

Right. I mean, I think that people are really drawing the wrong lesson from what is happening

or the outbreak investigation in Provincetown. The correct lesson first is to say that the vaccines

worked. I mean, if we did not have the vaccines, imagine the thousands of people who would have

gotten infected, the many dozens, if not hundreds of people

...