Demystifying COVID-19: Vaccines, variants, masks, and mandates with Dr. Don Kosiak

Since we first spoke to Leidos Chief Medical Officer Dr. Donald Kosiak 18 months ago, the world has changed in a myriad of ways we could never have imagined.

In today’s episode, Dr. Kosiak discusses variants, vaccines, masks, what the strategy is for exiting the pandemic and what we might see in the future when we manage to move past it.

At the start of the pandemic, people were thinking we might be able to suppress the virus, meaning we would eradicate it, but that’s just not the case. Coronaviruses tend to need to become endemic, like the common cold. Meaning the only way out of the pandemic for all of us is through immunity.

And that immunity can come in several ways: from getting COVID in the past and recovering, from getting the vaccine and gathering immunity, or a hybrid of those, i.e. getting the vaccine and having COVID infection.

“Until a large percentage of the global population, not just that of the United States, has one of those three things happen, we'll be reading about COVID and dealing with COVID for the foreseeable future.”

On today’s podcast:

• The strategy for exiting the pandemic
• What we can learn from past pandemics
• The vaccines and their effectiveness
• The Delta variant and breakthrough cases
• The debate on masks