Episodes

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Craig Spencer, Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Medical Center. A an emergency medicine and epidemiology expert on the board of Doctors Without Borders, Dr. Spencer talks about what he learned battling Ebola in West Africa, surviving the deadly illness himself, and how COVID-19 is revealing huge gaps in health equity and public health readiness that need to be repaired.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, Senior Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is Co-Chair of the Working Group on Equity in COVID-19 Vaccination, CommuniVax, which just released a detailed report, “Equity in Vaccination: A Plan To Work With Communities of Color Toward COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond”, with recommendations for state and local governments to support a vaccination campaign and coordinated pandemic recovery plan that addresses health disparities for people of color.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with scientist and entrepreneur Dr. William Haseltine, founder and CEO of ACCESS Health International, who warns the growing number of COVID-19 variants will help the virus evade the vaccines currently being deployed. He cautions that lack of strict public health measures, particularly in the US, will lead to more widespread infection and endemic outbreaks. Dr. Haseltine urges the pharmaceutical industry to provide more nuanced data on the long term efficacy of vaccines, along with more widespread genomic testing of COVID strains to better understand their impact on COVID-related illness.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, a global policy think tank dedicated to using science and scientific analysis to make the world more secure. The former Harvard professor and researcher has leveraged a significant Twitter following to share large volumes of aggregated information, research and data on the rapidly evolving pandemic, culled from multiple sources around the world.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Angela Rasmussen, who leads the core virology team at the Viral Emergence Research Initiative at the Georgetown University Center for Global Health, Science and Security. A renowned expert on emerging pathogens that pose great harm to human health, she helps us unlock some of the mysteries around Sars-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus. She talks about the swift production of the vaccine as a “scientific achievement of our lifetimes”. And looks at the risk of the growing number of variants of the virus, highlighting need to speed up global distribution of the vaccine to protect the population from greater threats.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with ER physician Dr. Megan Ranney, Assistant Dean of the Institute for Translational Science at Brown University and Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health. A frequent spokesperson across the media landscape on the COVID-19 pandemic, and founder of #GetUsPPE and the MyCOVIDrisk app, Dr. Ranney warns the new COVID-19 variant which is highly transmissible could spark a new wave of super-spreader events, and that poor preparation on vaccine distribution will slow our ability to contain the pandemic.