What to know about changing COVID vaccine guidelines

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

COVID-19 cases are on the rise again, and the federal guidelines for who should get vaccinated are in flux. We’ll unpack how it could impact what insurers are willing to cover this fall. And, as President Trump’s federal takeover of Washington D.C. continues, why is the city so quiet? Kimberly shares her take as a local. Plus, The Onion is proving that print publications can still thrive in the digital age.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"Why Washington Residents Aren’t Flooding the Streets to Protest Trump" from Politico
"Top White House officials turn to public appearances with troops as a tense Washington watches" from AP News
"JD Vance booed during hamburger handout to national guard troops in DC" from The Guardian
"Trump's police takeover of DC has a surprising casualty: restaurant reservations" from Fortune
"Will I Be Able to Get the New 2025 COVID Vaccine This Fall?" from The Cut
"For some, fall Covid shots may come with copays — or no coverage at all" from NBC News
"The Onion Brought Back Its Print Edition. The Gamble Is Paying Off." from The Wall Street Journal

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Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, I think I am good to go.
0:03.0	All right.
0:04.0	Hey everyone, I'm Riemechres.
0:10.0	Welcome back to Make Me Smart.
0:13.0	Where you, let me try again.
0:16.0	Where we make today makes sense.
0:18.0	And I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:20.0	Thanks everyone for joining us. It is Thursday, August the 21st, and some days it's just like that. I know. I'm trying.
0:28.8	Today we're going to do news and smiles. We'll start with the news. Do you want to go first, Kimberly?
0:34.7	Sure. I feel like I'm sort of split between two worlds today. So I started my morning in
0:40.8	Washington, D.C. and took the train up to New York where I'm in town for this anime
0:46.5	convention that I'm going to be going to anime, NYC. But to get there, I had to go through Union Station.
0:55.8	And Union Station in D.C., which is the main train station, the Amtrak hub, was in the news pretty quite a bit yesterday.
1:04.7	Because Vice President J.D. Vance, as well as Stephen Miller and Pete Hegeseth, were in Union Station handing out hamburgers
1:13.5	to National Guard troops and basically doing a big photo op about the federal takeover of law
1:22.1	enforcement in D.C. and the deployment of these National Guard troops. And I, you know, didn't see a huge deployment there when I was going through this morning.
1:33.0	There were a lot more police and other security staff there than I usually see when I'm going through.
1:40.6	But D.C. has just been really quiet since all this stuff happened. And it was captured in this Politico
1:52.2	article that I saw this morning while I was on the train. I was reading it. It said, why Washington
1:56.9	residents aren't flooding the streets to protest Trump? D.C. is built for protest, but after Trump's takeover, they aren't flooding the streets to protest Trump.
2:05.0	D.C. is built for protests, but after Trump's takeover, they aren't happening.
2:12.2	And there really have only been a couple of relatively small protests in the city about this, even though people, when you talk to them, are very upset.
	...

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