Sam and Emma host Jamie Ducharme, health correspondent at Time, to discuss her recent book Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul. Then, Sam and Emma are joined by Dr. MarkAlain Dery, infectious disease specialist at AccessHealth Louisiana and host of the Noise Filter podcast, to discuss the recent developments with COVID and the Omicron variant. Jamie walks Sam and Emma through how Juul swept across US high schools after its release in 2015, peaking at around 30% of high schoolers in 2019, before a string of misinformation on black market-THC cartridges lead to an array of anti-vape messages being disseminated across both high schools and DC, pushing Trump’s FDA to begin taking on e-cigarettes. They also discuss the validity of considering e-cigs as a cigarette alternative, before looking behind the scenes at Juul’s marketing to young people, and how truly negligent they could be. Next, Dr. MarkAlain Dery makes his Omicron return as he covers his experiences as the variant’s impact on hospitals begins to reach its peak, why, despite its lower virulence compared to Delta, Omicron is still about as deadly as the wild type, and what differentiates the variants when it comes to long COVID. He, Sam, and Emma also discuss Omicron’s impact on children, what sort of variant development we might see post-Omicron, and look deeper into efficacy numbers around testing, quarantine, and masks. Sam and Emma round out the free half with Biden’s transfer to voting rights and the filibuster, and Mitt Romney’s claim that they are really voting wrongs.

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