Dr. Rob is out with family, so Lucy anchors with Dr. Donahue — and the guest is one of the more improbable people on this network. Every quote below plays the exact moment from the broadcast — just tap it.
The seasons to celebrate, and the seasons to be wary
Donahue opens on autumn as “a season of many colors” — football, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa — and then turns the corner.
October also represents the start of multiple other seasons — return to school season, election season, but more ominously, flu season, RSV season, COVID season. The seasons to celebrate and the seasons to be wary.
It is National Healthy Lung Month. Lucy rolls an Academy animation on asthma and alveolar gas exchange; Donahue answers with his younger son's childhood asthma, the nebulizer, and the backup generator the family carried on trips.
I'm just Mama, and what we're trying to do is connect world-class experts directly to the kitchen table and the moment.
The physician who designs couture
Dr. Rajiv Fernando — infectious disease, emergency and disaster medicine, co-chair of WADEM's Infectious Disease Special Interest Group, Harvard disaster-medicine fellow — is also a haute couture designer whose label funds a clinic in Kyiv and the NGO HealCorp. He joined two days after returning from Ethiopia's Tigray region. His message does not require a runway.
Throughout this podcast or webinar, you will hear the simple concept that I mentioned, which is vaccination saves lives. It's quite simple, quite straightforward.
He reads Australia's severe southern-hemisphere season as the forecast for ours, and flags where the United States is starting from.
The vaccination rate in the United States is less than fifty percent, and I'm anticipating a severe season.
Lucy makes it personal — her sister-in-law's untreated Christmas cough became fluid around the heart, then cardiomyopathy, then five years on a heart transplant list.
One becomes twelve becomes half a million
A pre-recorded Dr. Rob teaches the arithmetic that makes measles different from almost everything else.
This has something called an R-naught twelve. It's a very high factor, meaning one person can infect twelve, usually.
One case becomes twelve, becomes three thousand, becomes half a million inside twenty weeks. Fernando ties it to the threshold that stops it.
So once a town or community is over ninety-five percent vaccinated, that's when we have this phenomenon called community immunity. And it makes it extremely rare for someone to contract measles.
What you owe the person next to you
Donahue draws the line as cleanly as anyone on this network has drawn it.
You certainly have the right as a patient, as a human, to not be vaccinated and become ill. What I would question you don't have the right is to expose the teacher — your child's teacher who is on chemotherapy — or someone who's immunocompromised. So we owe an obligation to those around us.
He closes on headstones in Jersey Shore cemeteries — children buried before immunization existed. Lucy's last word goes, as it usually does, to the mamas.
If you see somebody wearing a mask, it's none of your freaking business. Keep walking on and don't make a judgment about it. They are obviously wearing a mask for some reason.