EPIDEMIC with Dr. Celine Gounder

In 1975, smallpox eradication workers in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, rushed to a village in the south of the country called Kuralia. They were abuzz and the journey was urgent because they thought they just might be going to document the very last case of variola major, a deadly strain of the virus.  When they arrived, they met a toddler, Rahima Banu. She did have smallpox, and five years la...

The 1970s was the deadliest decade in the “entire history of Bangladesh,” said environmental historian Iftekhar Iqbal. A deadly cyclone, a bloody liberation war, and famine triggered waves of migration. As people moved throughout the country, smallpox spread with them. In Episode 7 of “Eradicating Smallpox,” Shohrab, a man who was displaced by the 1970 Bhola cyclone, shares his story. After fleein...

Global fears of overpopulation in the ’60s and ’70s helped fuel India’s campaign to slow population growth. Health workers tasked to encourage family planning were dispatched throughout the country and millions of people were sterilized: some voluntarily, some for a monetary reward, and some through force.  This violent and coercive campaign — and the distrust it created — was a backdrop for the s...

In spring 1974, over a dozen smallpox outbreaks sprang up throughout the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Determined to find the source of the cases, American smallpox eradication worker Larry Brilliant and a local partner, Zaffar Hussain, launched an investigation. The answer: Each outbreak could be traced back to Tatanagar, a city run by one of India’s largest corporations, the Tata Group. When B...

At noon ET on Thursday Sept. 14, Epidemic host Céline Gounder and her guests will come together for a live web event. Click here to register for the event. In Conversation With Host Céline Gounder: Helene D. Gayle , a physician and an epidemiologist, is president of Spelman College. She is a board member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and past director of the foundation’s program on HIV, t...

Shahidul Haq Khan, a Bangladeshi health worker, and Tim Miner, an American with the World Health Organization, worked together on a smallpox eradication team in Bangladesh in the early 1970s. The team was based on a hospital ship and traveled by speedboat to track down cases of smallpox from Barishal to Faridpur to Patuakhali. Every person who agreed to get the smallpox vaccination was a potential...

In 1973, Bhakti Dastane arrived in Bihar, India, to join the smallpox eradication campaign. She was a year out of medical school and had never cared for anyone with the virus. She believed she was offering something miraculous, saving people from a deadly disease. But some locals did not see it that way. Episode 3 of “Eradicating Smallpox” explores what happened when public health workers — driven...

By the mid-1970s, India’s smallpox eradication campaign had been grinding for over a decade. But the virus was still spreading beyond control. It was time to take a new, more targeted approach. This strategy was called “search and containment.” Teams of eradication workers visited communities across India to track down active cases of smallpox. Whenever they found a case, health workers would isol...

In the mid-’60s, the national campaign to eradicate smallpox in India was underway, but the virus was still widespread throughout the country. At the time, Dinesh Bhadani was a small boy living in Gaya, a city in the state of Bihar. In his community many people believed smallpox was divine, sent by the Hindu goddess Shitala Mata. In Bihar people had misgivings about accepting the vaccine because,...

"Eradicating Smallpox” is a journey to South Asia, the site of the last days of variola major smallpox. Many epidemiologists and global health leaders thought that ending smallpox was impossible. They were wrong. Dedicated public health workers made it happen. “Eradicating Smallpox” is an eight-episode, limited series amplifying their voices. Host Céline Gounder, a physician and epidemiologist, tr...

In the years leading up to the pandemic, Dr. Celine Gounder, the host of the EPIDEMIC and American Diagnosis podcasts, had the opportunity to care for patients part-time at several Indian Health Service facilities around the United States. Working on the “rez,” one theme came up over and over: resilience. In this latest season of American Diagnosis, we’re going to share stories of Indigenous peopl...

"It's a really interesting question: how do we get closure in this pandemic?  I think a lot of people have hurt and loss that's not been acknowledged. I think acknowledging that loss is very important." - Andy Slavitt In this final episode of season 1 of EPIDEMIC, we look back on the coronavirus pandemic and how we can move forward with one of our first guests, Andy Slavitt, who was President Bide...

"Pregnant women who have SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to be admitted to the ICU, to need a ventilator  and are more likely to die than women of the same age who are not pregnant. Pregnancy definitely makes getting COVID-19 much more dangerous." -Andrea Edlow Some of the most persistent myths about coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it have to do with women's health. In this episode, we'...

"The pandemic has given us an opportunity to finally change this and if we don't, the economic impact from the fallout of women in the workforce is going to be devastating." -Erika Moritsugu The pandemic has upended caregiving and what it means to be a working mom. More than 2 million women have left the workforce because of the cost and effort of caring for children and older family members durin...

"When you're building a system like a vaccine passport you're potentially excluding millions of people because they don't have this thing that once was optional, but has now become indispensable." -Albert Fox Cahn How do you let people who are fully vaccinated get back to normal life without creating super-spreader events for those who haven’t yet been vaccinated? Some are calling for vaccine cert...

"You can't fight scarcity with scarcity. The only way out of the vaccine problem is by making a lot more of it." -James Krellenstein India is the world's largest supplier of vaccines but the government there suspended the export of all COVID-19 vaccines after a devastating outbreak this spring. This is just the latest reason why global health leaders are calling for a new, decentralized approach t...

"It's a triumph of science and engineering that we now have multiple effective COVID vaccines. We just need to find the political will to invest a bit more money and deploy them around the world." -Chris Morten President Joe Biden said the United States would be the world's "arsenal of vaccines" but critics say current plans to donate 80 million doses around the world are not enough. Instead, coun...

"They benefit from traffic no matter if it's good information or malignant misinformation. " -Imran Ahmed During the pandemic, disinformation campaigns have been targeting people of color with lies like African Americans can't get COVID or denying the pandemic is even real. In this episode, we’re going to hear more about how these disinformation networks are gaming social media algorithms. We'll h...

"What we really need to be doing is not belittle people. Don't wag your finger at them. Don't make them feel stupid or small for not having gotten the vaccine yet. Talk to them about why it's safe." - Gov. Chris Christie Conservatives have emerged as the group least likely to say they’ll get vaccinated. Getting more conservative Americans comfortable with the vaccines will be needed to control the...

"Disinformation is a deliberate falsehood put out to mislead an audience. But what we see more of are true bits of information where necessary context has been removed or manipulated in a way that makes it technically true but wildly misleading." -Bret Schafer  In this episode of EPIDEMIC, we’re going to look at disinformation during the pandemic. Specifically, we’re going to look at how the Russi...

"I don't think that herd immunity is a possibility for SARS CoV-2. I think there's going to be a different kind of equilibrium that we reach in the future where humans and SARS-CoV-2 co-exist in a much milder, more benign way." -Jennie Lavine The end of the pandemic might not mean the end of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, many scientists think COVID is here to stay, even with vaccines.  In this episode we'l...

"The messaging that we've done in West Virginia is, look, we are leading the country, and that has really given people a sense that we can dispel a lot of negative stereotypes. We can be a world leader in a positive way." -Chris Martin Rural America's vaccine rollout has bucked expectations. A recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that four in 10 rural Americans reported getting at...

"This virus does not discriminate. The vaccine is what is going to help to get us out of this crisis and stop the depth and the harm and the pain, which is what we're suffering two to three times more than our white counterparts." -Sandra Lindsay  Reports show that Black Americans are less likely to get vaccinated than the general population but Black healthcare workers are taking on the mission t...

"We have to have a conversation where we take people's fears seriously and try to figure out what is going on there." -Vanessa Gamble Black Americans are  twice as likely to die from COVID as white Americans. Despite this, polls show that African-Americans are less interested in receiving the vaccine than other groups. But for people of color who do want the vaccine, inequities in U.S. healthcare...

"I think a lot of people don't understand how fearful Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans are in this moment" -Toby Chow On March 16, a gunman in Atlanta killed eight people. Six of them were women of Asian descent. During the last 12 months, anti-Asian hate crimes were up 150% in the United States but the coronavirus pandemic is not the first time people of Asian descent have been stigmat...