With the pandemic death toll approaching 1 million people in the United States, Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and a Washington University alum, visited Washington University School of Medicine on March 2 and March 3, 2022. As part of the Department of Medicine's weekly Grand Rounds series, she sat down with William G. Powderly, MD, the J. William Campbell Professor of Medicine and co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, for a conversation about the challenges and successes of the pandemic. During the conversation with Powderly, Walensky answered questions about COVID-19 and noted that her earlier experiences as a physician working during the HIV/AIDS epidemic influenced her thinking about this newer public health crisis. She says the AIDS epidemic demonstrated that infectious diseases tend to weigh more heavily on some communities than others, and that this unequal burden is rooted in social inequities. She also praised the rapid development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, even as she admitted that vaccination rates need to improve in the U.S. and around the world in order to help the planet emerge from the pandemic. And she told trainees that, as difficult as the last two years have been for health-care providers, she wanted them to remember that a pandemic like the one we have been experiencing is exactly what that they trained for.

The podcast, "Show Me the Science," is produced by the Office of Medical Public Affairs at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.