This is Eric Topol for Medscape and thepodcast. It is a special privilege for me today to welcome Dr John Whyte, who is the chief medical officer at WebMD. Welcome, John.We're flipping the script because John has interviewed me several times during the pandemic. Now I get to interview him. I want to start with John's remarkable background. He had his internal medicine training at Duke and earned an MPH at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
For example, the other day I said to my wife,"The refrigerator is malodorous." And she said,"What? People don't use that term." And I said,"Yes, they do," and she said,"The media world has powerful matrices; I can see if a story isn't doing well on WebMD or a video isn't doing well on Medscape, just as I could on Discovery Channel. That tells you something. You have to go back and see what went wrong.
Herd immunity is something we focus on a lot. But if we look at it from a scientific perspective, it's really a mathematical guess. We don't really know. And some people out there, including some esteemed people, say it has to be 80% or 90%. We don't really know that. To say that with certainty can misinform people. What we need to say is that we need to get as many people vaccinated as we can. This is how we're going to protect people.
With respect to younger people who haven't wanted to be vaccinated, 100 colleges and universities are making it mandatory. They want to return to campus in the fall, but they aren't going to be allowed to if they aren't vaccinated. Houston Methodist Hospital just announced mandatory vaccination. I'm surprised that more hospitals haven't done that. I think we're going to see that. West Virginia is giving $100 savings bonds to people age 18-36 who get vaccinated.
The challenge is that the data are often gray; they aren't black and white. These decisions aren't easy. To a certain degree, there is interpretation in how you evaluate risk. People don't realize the amount of work that this takes. They look at every piece of data; they corroborate every piece of information. Not all regulatory agencies do that. And at the end, they often have to make difficult decisions that are gray.
Part of the challenge is that every piece of good news is countered by some bad news, and people are just getting frustrated.
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