COVID Update With Dr. Gigi Gronvall, Hopkins Center for Health Security

By Tom Hall,

Rob Sivak

Published July 21, 2021 at 12:28 PM EDT

Dr. Gigi Gronvall is an immunologist and senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. (JHSPH_CHS)

Tom's next guest today is Dr. Gigi Gronvall. She’s an immunologist and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Gronvall discusses the reasons for the rising COVID infection rates and the urgency of the campaign to persuade unvaccinated Americans to get their shots. She also addresses a technical point raised in the clip we play of a heated exchange between Dr. Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R, Ky.) at a Senate hearing yesterday. And the Hopkins scholar notes the growing consensus among epidemiologists and infectious disease experts that the origin of the COVID-19 virus that has killed more than 4 million people in the past 20 months was an infected animal for sale at the Wuhan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, and not a Chinese medical laboratory.

FILE - In this Jan. 21, 2020, file photo, the Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with the COVID-19 virus, sits closed in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province. The city of Wuhan was placed under a 76-day lockdown beginning Jan. 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Dake Kang, File) — In this January 21, 2020, file photo, the Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market sits closed after a number of people related to the market fell ill with the COVID-19 virus. Two days later, Wuhan, an industrial city in central China's Hubei province, was placed under a 76-day lockdown.

Dr. Gigi Gronvall joins us on our digital line from her home in Baltimore.