Kim
Hello everyone. I’m Kim Thiboldeaux, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to NEBGH Voices. Our guests today are Dr Vin Gupta and Dr Kate O’Brien. Dr Gupta is Managing Director of Health Innovation at Manatt Phelps and Phillips. He’s a pulmonologist and health policy expert focused on advancing health innovation and equitable care. And Dr Kate O’Brien is Director of the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals at the World Health Organization. She leads global efforts to strengthen immunization systems and expand vaccine access. Dr Gupta, Dr O’Brien, thanks for joining today.
Dr. O’Brien
Nice to be here.
Dr. Gupta
We’re fair. Thank you.
Kim
Excellent. So Dr Gupta, let me start with you. Just to welcome you to the show, you have a wide ranging background in public health, in clinical medicine. I think you’ve also spent some time in the military, in the Air Force. So can you tell our listeners more about your career path and the focus of your current work?
Dr. Gupta
Absolutely. Well, Kim, first of all, pleasure to be here with you and Dr O’Brien. I, you know, I would say that I the military paid for a lot of my medical education, and before I really understood what it meant to be at the bedside doctoring, I still practice about 3% of my time, in addition to being a reservist and working in health innovation, what I realized is just traveling the world as a pre medical student and then as a general medical officer for the Air Force, that we talk about health and specifically what we help, at least in my prior life, what, how we help support other countries and their health systems. You know, here we are with a senior leader at WHO, there’s a lot when it comes to soft power and how, and really, at the time, we were trying to advance priorities in health diplomacy through USAID, or in this case, to the US military. It can really help benefit our country and our national security. But it really sprung me off on this journey to understand the ways in which health priorities can really help with broader national priorities, whether or not their national security, whether they’re focused on business priorities and economics more broadly, but that health intersects with so many other parts of our daily life, and that was what really got me, sort of down my current path there, which is multi hatting and understanding the healthcare sector through a few different lenses.
Kim
That’s great, Vin, and also a tremendous work that you do on the media as well to help Americans understand so many of the complex health issues of today. So I’m really excited to have you here today. Dr O’Brien, you’ve held several leadership roles at the World Health Organization. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? And maybe, I think many folks have heard of the well of the World Health Organization, but maybe level set to talk about the mission of the WHO?
Dr. O’Brien
Sure. I’m really pleased to be here, both with Dr Gupta and with all of you. So I’m a pediatrician. I’m a Canadian as well, and I’m also a mom. I think all of those three things are sort of germane to the work that I’ve been doing over the past 30 years. So I’m an infectious disease specialist and but more than, frankly, more than 30 years ago, I found myself living and working in in Haiti, in Port au Prince Haiti, and that was after I’d finished my pediatric training. And it didn’t take very long, I’d probably say about 48 hours working on a pediatric ward in a slum area of Port au Prince so in the hemisphere of the Americas, and I realized that all that I had learned at Johns Hopkins where I’d done my residency really didn’t have any particular use or value for the kids that I was seeing on that ward. About 30% of kids who got admitted to the hospital died, didn’t make it out of the hospital, and the vast majority of what I saw were vaccine-preventable diseases. So it really it’s not that taught me I lived, that, that the grief from families of losing a child to a disease that I knew was completely avoidable and completely preventable was something that I wanted to work on. You know, we at Hopkins, there’s a bit of a saying there about saving lives, not one at a time, but millions at a time, and that’s what vaccines do. So that was really the start of my, my work on vaccines, and I’ve, I’ve spent over 30 years working both developing vaccines and also working out how to help countries decide which vaccines they want to use, what evidence there is to support those decisions, and for countries around the world to make good decisions about where they could best put their resources. So. So later in my career, I joined WHO, after having been a professor for probably over 20 years, 25 years at Johns Hopkins, and doing that kind of global work. And then I joined WHO, 2019 right before the pandemic hit, and I really wanted I knew from the work that I had done that the world is just a better place when WHO is at its best, and its main job is to convene the countries of the world to talk about health problems, because so many of the health problems are not problems that one country, one at a time, can solve. That’s really true of infectious diseases, because infections don’t respect borders. They don’t carry passports. Nobody told the infections they shouldn’t move from one country to another. So just like in the US, every state has a health department, but there does need to be a federal level that is coordinating and convening and providing support to states so that every state doesn’t have to go it alone. So that’s the that’s the work of WHO, it’s a secretariat. It’s the it’s the place where the ministers of health from every country around the world have agreed more than 60 years ago, that they would get together and they would talk to each other, and they would work together. And so WHO is the Secretariat of all those ministers of health.
Kim
Very powerful and very powerful. The short story that you shared about how 48 hours in Haiti launched an incredible, you know, career in this in this space, I love hearing stories like that. That’s wonderful. So, Dr Gupta, let’s start with the basics. I’m back in maybe like sixth grade science class. Can you tell us? Give an overview, what are vaccines? How do they work, and how are they developed?
Dr. Gupta
Sure, I’m happy to start Kim and we have an extraordinaire. And Dr O’Brien, so please, Dr O’Brien, will not be offended when you immensely improve on what I’m about to say as an adult pulmonologist. But I, yeah, I would say, in a really basic level, what we what we saw, would say, take the regular flu vaccine every year that we always want our anybody to take. You know, here in the US, six months of age and above, I’m looking to Dr O’Brien to just always to catch me here on on guidelines, especially for pediatric populations. But it, what it does is these vaccines, any number of them, across different diseases, they help our immune system, the cells in our body that produce antibodies that we always talked about during COVID, and then even cells like there’s another part of our immune system that we talked a lot about during COVID to a delayed public called T cells that are different than antibodies. But in and and in synergy, what basically happens is these vaccines teach our immune system and these different types of cells in our body to recognize let’s take the example of flu. If we were exposed to the flu virus after getting a vaccine, these these antibody producing cells and these other types of cells called T cells, will say, Gosh, I recognize, because of the vaccine, what that, that, that infection is. It’s the flu virus, and it recognizes that it shouldn’t be in the body. And and these antibodies, and then ultimately, these T cells, these two different types of immune system or immune fighting cells in our body go and do what they’re supposed to do, which is eliminate, ideally, the virus from our body. And so that’s what these vaccines are meant to do. They’re not, they’re not in any way impacting our our native cells. I know it often gets thrown around in in some parts of social media that vaccines have injurious impacts to our own cells or own DNA. That’s not true at all. What it’s really meant to do is prime the cells that produce antibodies, those that help support our T cells and other part of our immune system to recognize specific infections, specific, especially like flu, like COVID, were we to be exposed to them, say, in the winter months, and to say, You know what, that that virus shouldn’t be in our body? These antibodies are going to go do their thing, these T cells are going to go do their thing and eliminate it. And that’s what vaccines do.
Kim
What about, since we were sort of myth busting a little bit already, Dr Gupta, what about, um, what about the idea when people say, “Oh, I get this shot makes me sicker than if I were to, sort of, you know, get the disease,” and as someone who, by the way, who in 2009 had H1N1 whenever I when, now, when I hear the flu, I actually now really understand what it is. And when you have a cold, or the sniffles, it is not the flu. So tell us about that, that myth, perhaps that people hold.
Dr. Gupta
Yeah sure. You know, I can say that, and I can say this specifically, just what I’ve seen last few months. Let’s take your last point first. I think sometimes people think that it’s safer because this has been put out there over the last five years, and I love Joshua Brian’s perspective on this as well, that it’s better. Or, you know, it’s no big deal. If I were just to kind of toughen myself up and experience the flu, why do I need a vaccine? And, you know, or the same thing with COVID, let me just experience it. No big deal. Why am I bothering with these booster shots. And unfortunately, what I’ve seen time and again is that people that do that put themselves at unnecessary risk of ending up in the ICU. And what I see, what I saw time and again over the last, first half of 2025 are young people. I mean, I’m thinking of a mom in her early 40s. Otherwise, you know, very minimal medical history, we end up needing something called ECMO, which is, we take your blood out of your body, we attach it to an oxygen circuit to oxygenate it, and we put it back into your body. It’s called ECMO for short. A lot of young people in their late 30s and 40s, otherwise pretty healthy, coming in with terrible flu, and they kind of predicted that they were not vaccinated, and this is exactly what the vaccine is meant to prevent. It’s meant to prime our immune systems to have antibodies on the ready. It’s like our first response. Notice the first responders of our body to say, gosh, if we see flu enter, we’re going to go and we’re going to eliminate it from our body. It may not be entirely effective, which is why you might experience sniffles or cough or mild symptoms. These vaccines are not meant to prevent all symptoms from, you know, occurring in the first place. They’re not great at preventing a positive test, which is, I think, where we maybe missed the mark in messaging early in the pandemic, none of these vaccines, especially against respiratory viruses like COVID, lights flu, are perfectly able to prevent you from testing positive or Kim from even experiencing what we hope are mild symptoms, cough, maybe a cold, maybe a sore throat. What these vaccines are phenomenal, though, at preventing are somebody ending up in an ICU, at my ICU and needing to be placed on a ventilator. They prevent severe illness. They do not prevent a positive test.
Kim
Got it, got it helpful. Dr. O’Brien I want to get to some of the trends that we’re seeing and reading about. I know the data shows that vaccination rates are declining among both children and adults in the US, and that trust in public health institutions has eroded. Why do you think this is happening, Dr. O’Brien?
Dr. O’Brien
Well, it’s such an interesting question. So first of all, the US is a country that has been a real leader in the field of immunization, both the science of immunization, the development of vaccines, and I really want to you know, build on what what Dr. Gupta was just explaining that about 50 years ago, in fact, exactly 50 years ago, in the wake of the success of immunizing against one of the most feared diseases, smallpox, which probably almost nobody listening to this podcast has ever heard of a case, seen a case, had a case in their family, because smallpox was eradicated nearly 50 years ago, and eradication means that it doesn’t exist anywhere in the world anymore, except for in two laboratories, one in Russia, one in the United States. But there is absolutely nobody ever anywhere in the world anymore, who gets smallpox. And the reason for that is truly the miracle and triumph of vaccines. And so when that was happening, when that during the Cold War, when every country in the world, including Russia and the US, got together and said, this is such a terrible disease and it is completely preventable, there was a full commitment to eradicate this disease. And in the wake of that success, the ministers of health, the heads of state of every country, got together and said, You know what? There are a lot more vaccines that we have, and they’re not, you being used enough to prevent human suffering. And so a program called the expanded program on immunization was committed to by every country around the world, and that’s the basis of the immunization program in every country around the world. In fact, immunization is the program that has the furthest reach and the deepest scale of any intervention anywhere in the world. Every country you go to has an immunization program, and we have gone from seven diseases that were vaccine preventable 50 years ago to now over 30 infectious diseases that can be prevented from vaccines. Now, not all 30 are relevant for every country around the world. We have diseases like yellow fever that’s vaccine preventable, but that’s not a disease that affects European countries or North American countries, for instance. So not every one of the 30 diseases is a disease and a vaccine that’s recommended for every country, but there are 13 vaccines that are recommended that every country in the world should be putting into an offering to the people of that of that country to protect them from disease. But vaccines, of course, don’t save a single life. Only vaccinations result in protecting against the severe disease that Dr. Gupta was speaking about, and the worst outcome of all is death, preventable deaths. And so it’s really vaccinations that we’re interested in, in monitoring over the years, both to help countries do better in terms of their vaccine program, help communities and families and and insurers and others be sure that everybody is being offered and has access to the vaccines that will benefit their well being, benefit their health. So what have we been seeing in terms of coverage, which is how we refer to it? You know, the fraction of those who should be vaccinated that actually are vaccinated. And what we’ve seen is that, from a global perspective, the world has made enormous progress over those 50 years. In 1974, about 5% of kids around the world were getting the basic vaccines. Fast forward to 2024, 50 years later, and over 85% of kids around the world are getting vaccinated against these very most basic vaccines. The vaccines that contain vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough are also called pertussis. So in fact, on July 15 of every year, WHO, along with UNICEF, we release the data for the past year’s vaccination coverage. And so we have very hot off the press data on how the world did in 2024 and I’m pleased to say that there was some progress made compared with 2023 and the reason I say some progress made is that when COVID hit, every program around the world, that was an immunization program, went backwards. And the reason that programs went backwards is, first of all, health workers were being deployed to actually deploy COVID vaccines. So a lot of them were taken out of the routine program and were being using their skills to deploy vaccines against COVID, which was, as we know, killing many, many people around the world. And the second reason is that there were many disruptions to the health system in countries in pretty much everywhere around the world. So we saw this backsliding in vaccination, which we’d never seen before. And most countries that are have strong health systems bounced back pretty quickly and were able to get back to the level of performance that they had before the pandemic, but countries that have fewer resources were hit really hard and are still trying to recover from the hit that the immunization programs took during COVID. But in 2024, what we see is, in fact, coverage has nearly rebounded to the level in 2019 before the pandemic, and one of the most important measures that we look at is those children who receive not even a single dose of vaccine through the immunization program. We call them zero dose children. And zero dose children exist in every country. There’s no country that doesn’t have some kids who are simply not vaccinated, and that includes the United States. What’s really important though to realize is that kids who are lacking vaccines, either completely, or who are lacking some of the vaccines that they should have gotten, they’re not randomly distributed in the community, and that’s why, even in countries like the US that has very high coverage rates, although there has been weakening in the US of that coverage, we still see outbreaks of disease. And the reason we see outbreaks of disease is that kids who are not vaccinated or low coverage rates tend to cluster in communities because of beliefs that are shared in the communities, or because of faith-based reasons, or for lots of different reasons. You know, people tend to cluster with others that are like them, and that’s why we’re seeing outbreaks happening in the US that have not been seen for a very long time.
Kim
Wow. Dr. O’Brien, we’d love to link to that report that you just referenced, your new data, and when we send out the podcast, we’ll be sure to get that from you. Dr Gupta, I want to pivot to employers. You know that that’s our primary audience at NEBGH, and we saw in 2022 that the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people view their employer as their most trusted source of health information. Why do you think that is, and then what opportunity does that create for employers in educating their workforce about vaccines?
Dr. Gupta
You know, ultimately, half of adults here the United States get their their health coverage through their employer. And what we found that I’ve seen this in my prior roles at places like Amazon, that employers still and this is incredibly important to take advantage of, I think, moving forward, they they hold a lot of trust with their employees when it comes to messaging on health. And that same survey that you mentioned from Edelman said that employees expect their employers to take an active role in maintaining their health and wellness. And so one, they expected, and two, they’re willing to listen to it. That’s pretty incredible, especially in this day and age when I think the government is challenged to be able to reach, you know, more than 50% of the US populace who are just focusing on the United States. Obviously, we have entities like the WHO trying to do the best in this environment, and I think they’re breaking through, and they’ve had incredible successes, as Dr O’Brien pointed out, over the fullness of time. But moving forward, I do a proactive strategy on the part of employers to really lean into this role only makes sense. We know it improves wellness and productivity. So if you’re thinking about this, if the CFO was thinking about, “Well, I just want my employees to come in and and not be absent because of preventable illness,” well, then there’s a business case for this, of course. But then just from a holistic, just Corporate Responsibility perspective, you know what’s good for the community in which the corporation exists? In a healthy community, of course, it means probably a more thriving business. So there’s always that through line. But I do think you saw some pretty fantastic examples of employers stepping into the void of health information during the pandemic, when, and that void specifically, was, who does an employee trust? If it wasn’t government, if it wasn’t another source, if it wasn’t say, media, I contribute a lot to media, if it was the employer, then that’s fantastic. And I saw I saw it at Amazon. I saw it at other entities as well, employers trying to step into that void and fulfill those expectations. And I think that they need to do more of it. And you know, as we’ve seen with Benefits Messaging, people often are confused when it comes to, you know, going on their benefits dashboard, understanding what they are and are not eligible for, or getting a mailer in the mail so in person to sign up. Those things are confusing. They’re not that very effective. And employers leading into digital communication, being digitally savvy, having a digital presence where people are actually getting their information to me, is going to be really critical as we think about what what’s really going to shape behaviors and what’s going to really impacts utilization over the next 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be in the digital space.
Kim
Super helpful. Dr Gupta, thank you, Dr O’Brien, as we see sort of this decline in trust and decline in vaccination rates, are we at risk of seeing the return of diseases that were once nearly eliminated. There are a lot of headlines this year about measles, so does this rising rate of hesitancy potentially have that risk attached to it?
Dr. O’Brien
No, there’s certainly this risk, and the risk is real. It’s not just a theoretical risk. I spoke earlier about smallpox being the one human disease that’s ever been eradicated. So that means that every other infection for which we vaccinate against is out there, and the only reason why we may not see it in our families or communities is because vaccination rates have been so high. So there’s sort of this paradoxical perception among some people that because I don’t have any experience with this disease in my community and my family, my friends. I guess it may not be. Some people think it may not be important to vaccinate, and that’s exactly the opposite. The reason that you’re not going to visit, you know, the loved ones in the hospital or going to funerals of kids. The reason for that from vaccine preventable disease is because people have been vaccinated. So this issue of trust and confidence is really at the heart of vaccine programs. Without trust, there is no scalable vaccination, and I think this is being learned again and again. In communities, not only in the US, but in other countries around the world as well. And I want to just really zero in on the way in which disinformation can reverse decades of progress that has been made for these vaccine preventable diseases. You know, confidence in vaccines is something that has to be earned on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and it’s earned on the basis of evidence. It’s earned on the basis of good science, sound policy making, relying on the independent advocacy of experts who have spent their lives really understanding how the immune system works. And Dr. Gupta spoke earlier in the podcast about the way in which vaccines work. And I really want to emphasize that the immunity that is developed after getting a vaccine is your body’s own immune system responding. It is natural immunity. People get confused between getting an immunity because you get an infection and getting immunity because you get a vaccine. These are your own immune system that is developing immunity. The question is just, are you risking a serious disease by being exposed to that infection, or are you protecting against the suffering from that disease by developing immunity through, through a vaccine? Now the confidence in vaccines is really shaped by a lot of different factors that’s primarily, partly the perception of the disease risk, and so vaccines have a tendency to be a victim of their own success. When vaccinations are really working and are widespread, the success is that nothing happens, and so that’s kind of hard to then perceive what has been prevented when you actually don’t see what has been prevented. Also, you know, confidence is shaped by the importance of vaccines, trusting in the safety of vaccines. And Because vaccines are given to Healthy People populations, they have to meet the very, very highest safety standard, and they’re tested for safety in the development of a vaccine. And then, even after vaccines are deployed, there is a day in day out monitoring of safety in countries around the world, particularly in the US, other high income countries, data is collected day in and day out, so anything that signals that there may be a safety problem is detected, is immediately responded to to figure out, Is this something real? Is this related? Or is this something that that was coincidental? And the issue of false claims about vaccination, we’ve seen can spread like wildfire online, and there is no vaccine against misinformation. So this is a real threat. Obviously, we see that some of these messages are often very emotionally charged, and the threats that are expressed are very complex and yet raise questions in people, they don’t know where to turn to to find accurate information. So souped that that information is really readily available.
Kim
So, so helpful, so helpful. We’re getting close to the end of our time together, but Dr. Gupta, I just do want to touch on COVID 19 for a moment. Just two questions, to what extent do you think that the COVID 19 pandemic contributed to decline in vaccination rates or increase hesitancy and also. So here we are, Summer 2025, is COVID still a serious public health threat in the US? I mean, do we know how many people died from COVID-19 in 2024? How should we be thinking about COVID going forward?
Dr. Gupta
I’m drawing up those numbers so I don’t misspeak. I Kim, so I’m gonna, I’m gonna make sure that I have those figures at the air. Here’s what I would say. Ask your first, yes, I do. I do not think that the pandemic helped. And I think maybe I’m perhaps saying something that a lot of people would agree with helped with vaccine confidence, because in some cases, we created or public messaging here, at least in the United States. And it’s easy, somebody interpreted this as me quarterbacking, and it’s easy to look in hindsight, and I acknowledge that, but even at the time, I think about sort of one of the missteps that I wish we had back, which was some of our leading officials here in the United States being very optimistic about the purpose of the mRNA vaccines for COVID as eliminating even the chance of testing positive and eliminating any potential transmission of the disease. So what we’ve seen through decades, and I say this as a lung Doctor, is it’s very hard to prevent mild symptoms or infection with a vaccine, even if it’s a really terrific one, like these state vaccines are built on new technology, and so I worried that we overstated and then with the best of intent, the purpose of vaccines for respiratory viruses, and that has created this Pandora’s box of people and skeptics out there, as Dr. O’Brien beautifully laid out that then will go on the internet, on your favorite social media platform, do a 20 second recording of some issue that they experienced, or maybe they heard of an anecdotal and then called to question the whole operation that’s been built on on sound research, because they have a story that went viral. And so I do worry that… I think COVID created these unfortunate incidents that have just lended fodder for the 5% to10% of people out there that are looking to actively misinform and are looking for these opportunities. And I think that that we’re going to continue to face that challenge, because there’s going to be some people out there with now intent. I firmly believe that. I also think we have to get better and be more nimble when it comes to what we say and how we say it. The mixed informers are excellent at taking stories, one story, one anecdote, putting it on social, getting viral clicks, something that is evidence based is probably not going to be as compelling, but we have to be much more nimble on storytelling and on holding and creating mechanisms that I think are legislated to hold those that are actively misinforming accountable. That’s the only way that this is going to have some degree of, we’re going to have some degree of order here, and I even think that’s going to be imperfect. But to me, that imperfect answers to your first question on the second. I mean, you know, 10s of 1000s of people still died from COVID in 2024. Is it a public health problem of the same magnitude it was in 2020? Absolutely not. I think that suggests that it is the same magnitude is your best part is maybe the lack of nimbleness here that we’ve seen that we should be willing to acknowledge those things. But I’ve seen that largely, that there is that willingness to acknowledge it, and that the purpose of booster shots is different than it was, say, you know, over the last three or four years, but, but no, it is, it’s not up to the same level from a public health standpoint, as it was over the last five years.
Kim
I appreciate that, and I, I think one of the things our employers are struggling with is where to go for good information about vaccines. We at NEBGH just reissued last month, our vaccine guide 2.0 and by the way, it’s got a lot of downloads, so I think our members are going to it, and it was, you know, medically reviewed. And we are at NEBGH, we lean into the science, we lean into the evidence, and we, you know, stay away from the myth. So I know folks are going there, but I’d love to hear from both of you. Do you have advice for our employers? Look, we’re getting, we’re heading into the flu season, right? And we’re going to have new, new, you know, flu shots, COVID boosters, things like that, into the season. Dr. O’Brien, are there, you know, places on the WHO site where our employers can go? Dr. Gupta, other advice or tips that you have if you’ve had a chance to, you know, look at our guide. I think that’s certainly a good place for reference point as well. But let me start with you, Dr. O’Brien, and then Dr Gupta, yeah.
Dr. O’Brien
So WHO is not, you know, a national body. What we, WHO is we do is pull together the world’s experts from around the world to develop policies that WHO can recommend that then can be adapted for each country context, and every country is a little bit different about the way they fund their program on immunization and the nature of where the country is in the world. So it really is countries who set their vaccine policy, but on our website and on our social media channels, these are great resources to be able to find information about vaccines that is lay information, but also technical information. In fact, our strategic advisory group of experts, which is a committee, an independent external committee that’s brought together from around the world twice a year to deliberate on policy questions and the recommendations that they provide to WHO become WHO’s recommended policies and countries around the world can look to that evidence that’s been brought together systematically. We don’t cherry-pick evidence really important in vaccine policy that you’re looking at the entirety of the evidence. So I’d really recommend WHO’s website and our social media channels, which provide great resources to be able to find information about vaccines. This includes a vaccines explained series, which is a set of illustrated articles that describe how vaccines work, although Dr. Gupta gave a great explanation of how a vaccine works, but also we provide information about how vaccines are developed, what’s in vaccines, how they’re distributed, and our website has background on every vaccine recommendation from WHO. The second thing I would say is that in the United States and in other countries, really good sources of information are national medical associations, where your doctors, the ones who are your pediatricians, your Obstetricians and Gynecologists, your pulmonologists like Dr. Vin Gupta, your infectious disease specialists, are part of these associations, and they’re the ones who are taking care of your seeking out for your your health care, and usually are the most trusted people for an individual is their personal health care provider. So these national medical associations, especially pediatric associations, provide good, accurate information about vaccines, both for children and for adults, and then we at WHO also hosts something called the vaccine safety net, and this is a global network of websites that are reviewed by the World Health Organization and have a sort of moniker of providing reliable information. You can also look for that seal of approval, if I can put it that way, that sites that are part of the vaccine safety net, that that are providing really accurate information. And if I can just wrap by saying I wanted to really sort of double down on something that Dr. Gupta mentioned, that lot of the misinformation is quite it’s quite extraordinary. It’s quite, you know, emotionally charged. And the reason it is that way is, of course, social media. We all understand how social media works. Social media is an entity that the more you click, the more you go down into staying on the websites. There is profit made from staying on the websites. And so the more salacious it is, the more you know extreme it is, it grabs your attention. And as he said, actually, the truth about most of this stuff is not that exciting. In fact, vaccines are so safe that there’s not usually very much exciting to say about the safety
Kim
No news is good news. Dr. O’Brien, in the in the vaccine world.
Dr. O’Brien
If you’re finding something that sounds really kind of, you know, outrageous, I would, I would really recommend that you do a double double think on that, that that almost certainly is, is something misinformation out there trying to grab your attention, trying to keep you going down a rabbit hole on a website.
Kim
Dr. Gupta, closing thoughts for our employers?
Dr. Gupta
You know, yes, I and I’ll touch on two quick things. One is, you know, what I’ve noticed, and I think we’re going to be dealing with this for a very long time is medicine is imperfect. It always has been. And this field that both Dr. O’Brien, I have been trained in, nothing’s a certainty. We’re always it’s that was called the art of medicine. There is judgment, and data is imperfect, and studies that yield a result. You know, the very best studies still have some uncertainty. Now, not every question or theoretical situation can be examined, because that’s that’s just the art of medicine. And for a very long time, I think people understood that, and understood that there is certainty and that we’re getting a recommendation based on our best available knowledge, because of this study, or you name it, because the FDA looked at all available evidence and said, This is safe and the benefits well outweigh any potential risks. We’re now entering a space where that whatever amount of uncertainty that may exist in the field of medicine when it comes to a new vaccine, a new therapeutic, maybe things that we’ve told held to for decades, wherever there’s uncertainty, and by the way, it’s everywhere, is being manipulated and weaponized, as us now hiding something from people and because why aren’t.. why don’t we understand and close that gap in our knowledge, or why are we not 100% certain on something else? It’s all to say that employers are going to have to navigate the space to some degree as well, which is to say that knowledge isn’t perfect, but simply asking questions. And you’re going to see this from time to time from some of our leaders across the spectrum, and this happens on both sides the political aisle. So this is not a political statement, but it’s to say that just simply asking questions and pointing fingers and saying that somebody’s hiding something isn’t leadership. That is not leadership, and that’s actually not fundamentally leading us towards some greater enlightenment. All it’s doing is it’s. It’s, it’s needlessly causing churn, but it’s not actually, you know, leading us to some greater insight. What I’d say is i plus one, everything that Dr O’Brien said in terms of sources that are great, if anything, I think we should all convene on what are a set of sources here and continue to try to collectively lift them up. So I think the Vaccine 2.0 guidance from NEBGH, it’s been fantastic. I loved it. It’s very user friendly. Eerything that the WHO turns out, both in the across digital and social, is fantastic. I love your illustration, illustrations that you put it on various social channels. And I think that’s where we got to do more. We need employers.. my call to employers is, have your health team or your health benefits team be more active on social, create accounts and Tiktok, Insta, elsewhere, for multi purpose use, for benefits utilization, for just general health messaging. I don’t think we see enough of that. And I see no reason why they shouldn’t lean in.
Kim
Yeah, listen, I want to, I could go on for I think we could go on for hours in this conversation. That actually leads me to a nice teaser. We are going to have Dr. Gupta and Dr. O’Brien back in September for a webinar on vaccines. We’ll be able to dig a little bit deeper, but I want to thank you both for joining. I do want to remind our listeners that we have released our new vaccine guide. You can find it at NEBGh.org, so check it out. I know a lot of our employers are using it as they start to plan for the fall, but I really appreciate all of the recommendations that you guys have provided. Then I love the idea of all of us getting together and continuing to put these good resources forward for our employers. You know, at NEBGH, we cover over 11 million lives just in the US alone, and so we have to continue to bring that information forward. So, thank you for your insights and perspective.
Dr. O’Brien
Great. This was really great and Vin, it’s been really, really a pleasure to be on with you.
Dr. Gupta
Right back at you. It’s an honor. Is fine. Thank you, Dr. O’Brien, and thank you, Kim, and NEBGH.
Kim
This has been NEBGH Voices. Thank you for tuning in, as always, I wish you wellness.
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and I am one of the voices. I am one voice, one of the voice of NEBGH
