Firing Line: Celine Gounder & Ashish Jha

In this episode of Firing Line, doctors Celine Gounder and Ashish Jha talk about the Delta variant, vaccine hesitancy, and the Tokyo Olympics. 

Goudner started out with the dangers of the Delta variant. The problem stemmed from the fact that it was more contagious unlike previous variants. 

Jha added on to this by saying that there were currently up to 200,000 infections per day. Although most have gotten vaccinated, a lot of people were at a higher risk.

One of the biggest things that Gounder and Jha addressed was the vaccine hesitancy. Gounder said that there were many valid reasons why one might be hesitant to the vaccine.

“You have communities of color that have very good reason not to trust the medical system,” she said. Furthermore, she also addressed others who believed that the vaccine had been politicized.

Jha addressed that many unvaccinated people had been demonized. He believed that calling unvaccinated people ‘anti-vax’ was both unhelpful and wrong. He said that a lot of people had questions regarding the vaccine and it was best to listen to their concerns.

“There are lots of reasons why people haven’t gotten vaccinated,” he said. “Yelling at them rarely works.”

Despite the risk of the Delta variant, the Olympics games in Japan were still going on. However, local media reported a rise in cases to the point where hospitals needed more beds and postponed non-emergency surgeries. 

Gounder said that this was expected to happen. Although Japan did have protocols set in place, she knew journalists in the area who reported that a lot of people circumvented these protocols.

Jha added on by saying that Japan did some things very well, but they could had done better. He gave the suggestions of requiring everybody to be vaccinated. But, he did add on that holding the Olympics during a pandemic was high risk behavior.