“We’re not done with this,” warns Stanford epidemiologist Steven Goodman about the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe my big brother.

In March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading and lockdowns were being imposed, I asked Steven to join me on the Vermont Conversation to share publicly what he was telling me privately about this novel virus. While President Trump assured us that the coronavirus would “miraculously go away” with the arrival of warm weather, Steven warned that what was coming would “an impending catastrophe.” He explained the cold calculus of exponential growth and accurately predicted the calamity that soon unfolded.

Steven Goodman, M.D., MHS, Ph.D., is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine.

Today, a fourth wave of Covid-19 is sweeping the country, driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant. While vaccinated Americans are cautiously savoring a return to normalcy, a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is raging, as nearly all new deaths are among the unvaccinated. Yet Republican leaders and right wing media are churning out vaccine disinformation, resulting in vaccination rates of under 35 percent in some states. This large reservoir of unvaccinated people will inevitably become everyone’s problem.

“We’re all connected,” Steven says on The Vermont Conversation. “As large portions of major states go unvaccinated, they will become the factory for infections even among vaccinated people. We’re not immune…to the effects of other states and other people who’ve chosen not to be vaccinated.” Unvaccinated communities “turn into virtual waterfalls of mutations and spread of the virus. We’re going to see far less virus in the highly vaccinated populations than if they weren’t vaccinated,…but at the same time we’ll see far higher rates in those areas than if there weren’t states that were producing this waterfall of cases.”

Covid-19 remains a major threat around the country and the world, Steven insists. "This is still very much a pandemic — the phrase 'post-pandemic' should be banned. [Covid-19] is raging like an intense forest fire across this globe. There are whole countries and whole continents that are absolutely unprepared for the devastation that is about to be wrought.”