 I'm Mark Levine. I've been commissioner of health for almost precisely four years. As a physician, fundamentally, science is everything. I have a new granddaughter who is now not so new. When I last saw her, she was five months old, and now she's a year and a half. She knows us on FaceTime, but hard to believe she really knows us. And I would love to see her grow and develop, because I may not have the chance to see many more grandchildren. I certainly wouldn't have accepted the vaccine if I didn't believe in the science, believe that the technologies we're using aren't well developed by now and trustworthy, and that the studies revealed remarkable safety. Because nobody's gotten a vaccine that's mRNA-based before, and they never heard of it before. People think, oh, we turned this around overnight. But the fact is, this took decades to develop, and the only thing that turned around overnight was adapting it to this new virus. The thing that really spurred them on and got them to be successful this quickly during a pandemic is the fact that the funding was there from the federal government. Anytime you get prescribed something, you should ask about side effects. But then put the side effects in context. And with the vaccines, it turns out the things that are expected, they don't last very long, and they don't cause any lasting problem, whereas the things that are unexpected are in such small, small quantities. Another misperception is that the majority people aren't going to get too sick from the virus. There are many, many documented cases of very healthy young adult people who had a terrible course with this virus. And they're months later complaining of things like fatigue and shortness of breath and exercise intolerance and this fogginess in their thinking. We know the vaccine protects everyone against the most severe outcomes, hospitalizations, complications, and death. The vaccines are all highly effective. It is impossible to compare one to the other because the vaccine trials themselves occurred at different time periods during the pandemic. So there were different kinds of strains around at different times, and the pandemic was behaving differently in different places at different times. We wouldn't really say they're interchangeable if we didn't mean it. We're in the month of April, so that's over three months of experience in this country with the vaccine given to a large population. Add to that all the months preceding where the studies were going on and seeing how people did with the vaccine, we're now getting close to a year's worth of experience. I respect people who want to wait, but I just ask them how much time is sufficient time for you to begin to gain an appreciation from the impact it might have on opening new doors in your life that aren't open to you right now. Mental health and physical health are so intertwined, and the reality is the way we wake up every day and approach the day means everything because it dictates the level of stress we're operating under, the anxiety we feel. If something as simple as a vaccine can improve your mental health and protect you physically, you're going to be much better off. There's a bit of an invincibility feeling of people who are younger and not being as concerned about the vaccine. But the reality is there is this phenomenon called community immunity where the more of us that have immunity against the virus, the more we suppress that virus and it can't show its face. It can't then multiply in people that we transmit it to. It can't cause mutant strains that could cause, you know, who knows what kind of havoc in the future. Everyone in Vermont contributed to our initial efforts to suppress the virus and allowed us to have a summer and fall last year with the lowest rates in the country. Now it's even more important because we're talking about really getting out of this forever. Vermont continues to do extraordinarily well with this pandemic. Even on those days we have high case counts. Even on those times we hear that our child's school has had a case in it and we get a little nervous about what's the impact on the classroom and on the school environment. Even when we hear that our friend's work site had a case and they have to deal with that, there are always going to be moments because we are still in a pandemic and when you look at us in comparison to the rest of the country, we are really rated extremely highly in our response. There's no way that that response would ever have occurred without the cooperation and collaboration and compliance of every Vermonter because it takes a village to really beat this virus. And that's what we've had as our response here in Vermont. I appreciate that so much.