Healthy You

Parents have been waiting for this moment. To send their children to school in the morning without worrying that they will come back with Covid at the end of the day. The FDA has authorized the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.  On this episode of Healthy You - Surviving a Pandemic, we’re going talk about the Covid vaccine for young children with pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit. Offit sits on the FDA vaccine advisory board and is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. 

There is one profession that we trust more than any other. We trust nurses. And during the pandemic they have become our lifeline. But what about the lives and well-being of the nurses who take care of us? On this episode of Healthy You - Surviving a Pandemic we talk to Ernest Grant the Director of the American Nurses Association – and Lucas Pieper, an ICU nurse who works with Covid patients in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Dr. Thomas Dobbs has one mission in life right now. And that’s to try and help people survive the Covid Pandemic. He is responsible for public health in Mississippi – a state with one of the highest Covid death rates in the country.  He struggles with low vaccination rates, rampant misinformation, and hospitals that have overflowed their capacity.  On the next Healthy You we talk to Dr. Dobbs about his struggles fighting Covid and learn why he is thankful for a handful of important victories.

The pandemic has made Sven Lindblad, founder of Lindblad Expeditions, think lot about the safety of the passengers traveling on his fleet of small ships.  So the pushback against vaccine mandates in the cruise industry is to him, non sensical. Host Frank Sesno talks to Sven about new Covid protocols - and the joy of travel after lockdown.

The speed with which the news about Covid-19 changes is truly astounding.  And now – we’re trying to make sense of conflicting information about boosters.  Does everyone need boosters?  And when should we get them? On the next Healthy You – Surviving a Pandemic host Frank Sesno is joined by Dr. Georges Benjamin the Executive Director of the American Public Health Association and Dr. Lynn Goldman Dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University to help us take some of the confusion out of booster shots.

Today we talk to Dr. Christopher Mores – a global health professor at George Washington University and the director of GW’s new infectious diseases lab.  Mores talks to host Frank Sesno about the risks and extreme transmissibility of the delta variant, the rising incidences of breakthrough infections and his work developing therapeutic treatments with monoclonal antibodies.

Day in and day out, public health workers are fighting Covid-19 on the front lines of their local communities.  And who is there to tell their stories?  Journalists.  Today we talk to Lauren Weber, Midwest correspondent for Kaiser Health News in St. Louis, Missouri and Michelle Smith, a correspondent for the Associated Press in Providence, Rhode Island, about their award winning series “Underfunded and Under Threat” which features in-depth stories of public health workers battling the pandemic across the U.S.

Hospitalizations and deaths due to Covid-19 are on the rise again in the U.S. On the next Healthy You – Surviving a Pandemic, we talk to Dr. Alice Chen about her efforts this summer to promote vaccination with her organization Made to Save, a national grassroots effort to ensure communities hardest hit by the pandemic have access to the Covid-19 vaccines and accurate timely information. Dr. Chen is also a practicing physician and has served as the executive director of the organization “Doctor’s for America” - a movement that mobilizes thousands of physicians and medical students in all fifty states to work toward access to affordable, high-quality health care for everyone

There will be a next pandemic. Right now we are in the position to ask what can we do to better prepare for it. Healthy You – Surviving a Pandemic host Frank Sesno talks to Tara Kirk Sell, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and a Senior Associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security about communicating more effectively going forward, and ways to mitigate public health disinformation.

If Covid infection rates are going down, do we risk becoming complacent?  Host Frank Sesno joins Dr. Leana Wen for an engaging discussion about the possible resurgence of Covid in unvaccinated sections of the country, the urgency of getting our kids vaccinated, and the increasing polarization of news coverage about the pandemic.