Health Wanted: Vaccines
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: With public support for childhood immunizations in the U.S. decreasing over the past two decades, keeping up-to-date on routine vaccinations has become even more important. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow and guest Jodie Guest, PhD, discuss topics including vaccine hesitancy, the benefits of vaccination, and how vaccines can be better distributed to populations in need.
The takeaway: Vaccines have been saving lives for centuries and continue to be vital for supporting the health of populations.
- One of the first historical examples of vaccines is that of smallpox. After people realized that exposing a healthy person to a small amount of the virus resulted in milder illnesses and lower death rates, physician Edward Jenner developed the first vaccination for smallpox in 1796 out of a similar virus called cowpox.
- Vaccines have been effective at fighting diseases like measles, whooping cough, mumps, chickenpox, and rubella. Many of these diseases were deadly, but vaccinating against them has since protected people from severe illness. Smallpox, a disease that killed 30% of its victims, has been globally eradicated through the use of vaccines.
- Since vaccination efforts have been so successful at preventing some of the most deadly diseases from our past, they are less prevalent. This causes some people to question the benefits of getting vaccinated. Your risk of a severe outcome from the infection is much higher than your risk of severe outcomes from vaccination. Choosing not to vaccinate can cause vaccine-preventable diseases to make a comeback.
- Herd immunity is achieved when a disease cannot spread in a population because enough people are already immune to it. This is especially important for the safety of people who are too young to receive vaccines or immunocompromised and unable to receive vaccines. By vaccinating the larger population, those at higher risk are being protected.
The Interview
The guest: Jodie Guest, PhD
The key takeaways:
- The internet can be a huge source of misinformation about vaccines for many people, but it can also be used as a resource for public health practitioners to spread proactive information. Meeting people where they are is important in public health, whether it be physically going to a neighborhood, listening to a community’s concerns, or having a larger online presence.
- When talking with people who are hesitant to get vaccines, it is important to listen to them and their concerns and be completely transparent about what you know and what you don’t. This helps to build trust with people and better understand their perspectives.
- The response to the COVID pandemic was highly imperfect. Information surrounding the speed and safety of the vaccine clinical trials was inadequately presented, and there was a huge inequitable distribution of vaccines once they were approved. If another pandemic happens, there needs to be a better system for scientists to communicate updates with the public and for people to get access to vaccines.
- Vaccinations are vital. COVID has gone from the third most common cause of death in 2020 to the tenth in 2023. Many other vaccines have made similar radical shifts in improving public health and have especially improved deadly childhood diseases that were a much more serious concern before vaccines were available.
The Listener Questions
What are the recommendations for people who have COVID these days?
The CDC recently updated its guidance to try and simplify recommendations on what to do to cover all respiratory illnesses. The new guidance is that people can return to normal activities once their symptoms have been improving overall and they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of fever-reducing medication.
They then suggest you take extra precautions for the next five days, which include increasing your access to clean air, practicing good hygiene like handwashing and not sneezing into people’s faces, masking, keeping physical distance, and testing.
Ideally, people would have sick leave and support to recover at home. If you are someone who tests positive and cannot isolate until you test negative, my recommendation would be to do necessary activities only (like work), wear a mask, and try to keep as much distance as possible from others until you are negative.
If you are sick and don’t have access to tests, then the CDC guidance of five days of masking and extra precautions after you’ve been fever-free with resolving symptoms for 24 hours is the best option. Keep in mind, this total time might be longer than 10 days depending on how long you are sick.
Should I be worried about “cortisol face”?
Cortisol face is this idea that you have a very defined jawline but it is being hidden from you by your excess cortisol. Cortisol is an essential hormone that regulates a lot of processes in your body and is released as a byproduct of stress.
The argument is that you are so stressed it’s causing so much cortisol and that’s why that jawline is hidden from you! Stress from daily life is really unlikely to be so high as to create a cortisol imbalance.
You might be a little puffy because you need to drink more water or eat less sodium, and the advice that a lot of TikTok accounts give for fixing “cortisol face” are just things that play into that like getting more sleep, drinking more water, and staying away from alcohol, which is all great advice in general, but not specific to your levels of cortisol which are most likely fine.
If you think you might have high cortisol levels you should see a medical doctor. Otherwise, be wary of people who invent an issue that you can pay them to solve.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
