Even after the 1918 pandemic supposedly “ended” a significant number of people continued to die from “flu-like illnesses” for years. So do pandemics really “end” or do they fade from the public’s consciousness? Medical historians Jeremy Greene and Graham Mooney return to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about how we really mark the “end of a pandemic”, why today’s vaccine hesitancy is strikingly similar to resistance to smallpox inoculations a century ago, and the hope that a focus on health disparities due to structural racism—not individual behaviors or innate characteristics—will endure through whatever the “end” of COVID-19 looks like.
