Boosters, Omicron, and What’s Next in the Pandemic

01/14/22 • 14 min

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The Omicron variant is sweeping across the United States and the rest of the world, breaking previous records of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. While it may cause milder illness, its transmissibility and ability to evade vaccines make this surge particularly challenging to navigate.

On the latest episode of The Dose podcast, host Shanoor Seervai asks Alison Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, to bring listeners up to speed on this phase of the pandemic. Galvani and her colleagues have found that increasing the number of boosters administered each day could save thousands of lives.

Vaccination is relatively inexpensive, particularly compared with the costs associated with hospitalizations and productivity losses, even from mild cases, she says.

Vaccination is relatively inexpensive, particularly compared with the costs associated with hospitalizations and productivity losses, even from mild cases, she says.

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Why Aren't More Kids Getting COVID Vaccines?

A year after adults in the U.S. began getting vaccinated against COVID-19, children ages 5 and up are now eligible for the shot. So far, uptake has been slow – in part because of parents’ concerns over vaccine safety.

On the latest episode of The Dose, pediatrician and American Academy of Pediatrics board member Michelle Fiscus, M.D., and the Commonwealth Fund’s Rachel Nuzum shed light on challenges and opportunities in raising child vaccination rates.

One downstream concern is a growing trend of resistance to other childhood vaccines. As Dr. Fiscus says, if “vaccine hesitancy continues to build with the routine childhood vaccines, I am very concerned about the types of outbreaks that we're going to be fighting over the next years.”

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Getting to Net Zero: One Health System Fights Climate Change

Climate change can have a devastating impact on our health. When people are injured or exposed to disease related to floods or fires, it’s up to health systems to pick up the pieces.

But health care itself is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industries, responsible for 4.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. What can health systems do to address climate change?

In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) has set some ambitious goals to reduce its carbon footprint. On the latest episode of The Dose, Nick Watts, the NHS’s chief sustainability officer, talks about how the health service is meeting these goals, and whether its efforts could be replicated in countries like the United States. A low-carbon health care system, he says, is actually just a good health care system.