joining us now is ashish aja, he's dean of the brown public school of health. dr. thank you for being here. >> thank you, rachel, thanks for having me back. >> you embody, with what you posted around twitter today around it, i wonder if you can tell people how to keep in mind these two things at once. that it does feel like we have a sense of what the shape of the omicron curve is going to be like, that we may be on the far side of it, on the downslope side of it. while also seeing health care staff in so many states beyond the point of overwhelmed still in the places where the crushes still lie. >> yeah, so, rachel, we do have two challenges right now. one is, there is good news, as you said, we are on the other side of this curve. and we hope we continue to slide down that curve pretty quickly. and i'm optimistic that we will, we'll have to see. what i'm worried about is what we do when we come down from each of these waves we decide, okay, the pandemic is over. we're moving on. unfortunately, the virus doesn't seem to agree with that. what i am calling for is to

ashish aja. dr.reinforce the fact that it's booster shots keeping older americans out of the hospital. how do you interpret it? >> thanks for having me back, the data here is what we've seen until other cases, boosters really work, they work great against delta and fabulous in terms of omicron, preventing severe illness. people who are older, who are higher risk benefit the most. >> dr. fauci said this week that vaccines for kids under 5 will be approved within the next month or so. talk about what that means in the fight against the pandemic, not just for parents who are thrilled about that information. but to fightly get shots for this vulnerable group? >> yeah, this is really the last group that is not yet eligible for vaccines. i do know for a lot of my friends who are parents, it's going to make an enormous difference for them. and it will be great to have everybody in the country, a person from age 6 months, all the way to 100 to be eligible for the vaccines. i'm looking forward to it. we'll se