Category: CHC Radio

Lies and Misinformation Led to Hundreds of Thousands of US Deaths: Yale’s Dr. Nicholas Christakis on Enduring Impact of COVID-19

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Nicholas Christakis, Director of Yale’s Human Nature Lab and expert on the influence of social networks on health and behavior. In his recent book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live” he examines the history of pandemics throughout human history, and says the ‘appalling” US response, driven by denial from the White House and amplified by social media channels led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. He predicts the pandemic will wind down in 2022, and that a period of innovation and improvements to health care delivery will follow, based on lessons learned from this crisis.

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“Roe Hanging On By A Thread”: Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson on Imminent Threat To Reproductive Rights

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Planned Parenthood Federation of America CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, on upcoming Supreme Court hearing on S.B.8., the Texas law banning abortion after 6 weeks. She discusses the record number of restrictive abortion laws across the country causing harm to patients and clinicians committed to providing family planning services, and the former administration’s Title X abortion ‘gag’ rule, which greatly hampered access to legally-guaranteed ‘right to choose’. She expects Roe-v-Wade will likely be permanently compromised with the current conservative configuration on the nation’s High Court.

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Mandates ‘Turbocharging’ Vaccination Rates: US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Vaccine Requirements, Boosters and Vaccinating Kids

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome “the Nation’s Doctor,” US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Co-chair of President Biden’s White House COVID Task Force. Dr. Murthy explains the FDA’s latest approval for mixing vaccine brands for booster shots. He also addresses White House plans to roll out COVID vaccine support for the nation’s 5-11-year-olds pending FDA approval, and how vaccine requirements are ‘turbocharging’ vaccination rates. Dr. Murthy examines the growing crisis of unmet mental health needs, addiction, and overdose in this country, exacerbated by the pandemic. He also discusses an initiative he’s creating to address burnout in the health care profession.

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“Safety Comes First”: FDA Vaccine Advisory Panel’s Dr. Ofer Levy on Rigorous Process Around Vaccine Approval For Kids

This week we speak with Dr. Ofer Levy, Director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and member of the FDA COVID Vaccine Advisory Panel. He talks about the recent decision to reject boosters for all recipients 16 and older, saying they didn’t have enough data for younger populations to make that recommendation. He says the review process for emergency authorization for young children aged 5-to-11 will be thorough, rigorous and transparent to the public. His team is also currently working on developing a COVID vaccine, as well as other vaccines that could be deployed for cancer and even opioid use disorder and fentanyl overdose.

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Why COVID Crushed Us: Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb Details America’s Botched Pandemic Response

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb whose new book outlines America’s epic failure in our response to the pandemic, leading to more than 700,000 deaths. “Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic” examines the inherent flaws at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public agencies that left us vulnerable to the raging pandemic. Dr. Gottlieb says the CDC and other agencies should be re-tooled to conduct more agile global disease surveillance, and that emerging therapeutics like Merck’s new oral COVID drug will be a game changer for treatment moving forward.

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US COVID Response Has Failed By Not Scaling Up Home Testing: Harvard’s Michael Mina on Rapid Tests as Best Chance to Contain Outbreaks

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Michael Mina, Epidemiologist and member of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard, where they are taking a multi-disciplinary approach to tackling the ongoing pandemic. Dr. Mina has long been a proponent of making cheap, rapid, at-home COVID tests available to all Americans as a much more effective way to curtail the pandemic’s spread, especially as tens of millions of children have returned to the classroom. He says these tests, which have been deployed successfully in other countries, are almost 100 per cent effective in identifying potential infectious ‘super-spreaders’, and that the CDC and the FDA should classify them as a public health, not a medical, tool to allow for more swift production and deployment. He also discusses their efforts to build a global surveillance system for future disease outbreaks.

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