I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, February 17th.

For people who have gotten fully vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control have an interesting and hopeful

new guideline. If you are vaccinated and then exposed to someone with COVID-19, you don't necessarily

have to quarantine. Now, that implies that the vaccine might make you less able to transmit the virus,

which has been a question.

The vaccine might protect you from getting really sick.

We know that pretty well by now.

But does it prevent you from actually getting and spreading the virus?

We'll see with our guest if we can get any more clarity on that.

So with those stories as Prelude, with us now is our guest, Dr. Drew of color, a practicing physician and professor at the Wild Cornell Medical

College. His research focuses on topics including health disparities and medical innovation.

He's also a New Yorker magazine staff writer whose latest article is

called Why Are So Many Healthcare Workers Resisting the Coronavirus Vaccine? The one before that

is called Biden's pandemic plan just might work. Dr. Carler so glad you could join us today.

Welcome to WNYC.

It's great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

So I'll bite on your latest headline. Why are so many healthcare workers, of all people,

resisting the coronavirus vaccine? Yeah, it's a great question, Brian. So one of the things that kind of surprised me and I think surprised a lot of people early on.

You know, on the one hand, you have so many people as your caller's email suggested

that we're really trying to get the vaccine and unable to get it.

On the other hand, we started hearing reports that even some health care workers were

expressing vaccine hesitancy, that they weren't jumping at the opportunity

...