How safe are you from coronavirus? When will this pandemic end? And why would anyone follow medical advice from a Green Bay Packers football player, no matter how beloved he is/was? Our nation’s Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy appeared on The View with answers to these questions and more. Read on for five life-saving pieces of advice that he wants every American to hear—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don’t miss these Sure Signs You’ve Already Had COVID.

“Just step back and look at where we’ve been. Right?” said Murthy. “Because I know sometimes when you read the news, it can seem like this pandemic is never going to end, but a couple of things I want to say very clearly, number one, this pandemic will end. We will get there to the end of this pandemic and we will do it together, driven by science, sticking together and helping one another. But the other thing that’s to know is how much progress we have made. We now have more than 190 million people who have been fully vaccinated in this country. That’s a big deal we have now with the advent of vaccines for kids five through 11, 28 million more people who can get vaccinated. We have the possibility of two oral medications on the horizon, which the FDA has to, it has to now investigate and review, but they may help us even further. So we’re making a lot of progress and the more people get vaccinated, the lower our risk of seeing a bump in cases down the line. But here’s my concern. We still have about 60 million people in our country who are not yet vaccinated. They’re our family, our friends, our neighbors, and they remain vulnerable, especially as the winter months come and people go indoors. So we’ve got to make every effort to talk to our friends to do so as kindly and empathically, as we can recognizing they may be the victims of misinformation as well, but urge them to talk to their doctor, talk to people they trust to get vaccinated. And finally, if you’re eligible for a booster shot, please go on and get one. It’s a great way to extend and enhance the protection that you’ve already been getting from the vaccine. And especially again, as winter comes, that’ll be good protection to have.”

Footballer Aaron Rodgers floated false claims about the vaccine affecting fertility, and Murthy addressed this. “Misinformation is a profound challenge when it comes to COVID,” said Dr. Murthy, “but health more broadly. One of the reasons in the summer I issued a Surgeon General’s advisory on health misinformation is because we were seeing that people were often being led to make decisions that harm their own health because of misinformation. And a lot of them were seeing it spread on social media. Some are getting into text threads and email chains through their friends, but here’s the challenging part what’s different now compared to 5, 10 years ago, is this the speed scale and sophistication with which this misinformation is spreading? So what can we do about it? Well, it turns out there is something that we can do. Number one, we can be mindful of what we choose to share online. Sometimes we think, oh, this article seems like it’s benign. It’s okay, listen, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. So we got to be careful. The second thing that we can do is talk to our family and friends. So how do you do that? You have to listen, you have to try to understand their point of view. A lot of people are victims of misinformation, even though they want to do the right thing, we all want our children, for example, to be safe. And finally, we should just remember this. All of us have a platform, whether that platform has to speak to our family or to speak to millions of followers, we’ve got to be responsible about what we say. You’ve got to share accurate information, recognizing that people make decisions based on what they’re here. And finally, we’ve got to get information from the right sources. I don’t ask my electrician for medical advice and I don’t go to my doctor for advice on what to do with my electrical system at home. So talk to your doctor, talk to your children’s hospital, to get information from sources that are credible and accurate.”

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“It’s a really good question,” said Murthy. “And this is a very reasonable question to ask, because we know when you get infections, your body does Mount some degree of protection and that happens with COVID as well. But here’s what we don’t know. We don’t know to the extent to which you build protection against future infection. Once you have an infection that you acquire, we also don’t know how evenly people across the population and protected. I’ll give you an example. There are some studies which show that people who are older above 65, actually don’t get nearly as much protection once they get infected. As people who are younger, there are there studies, which show that if you only had a mild infection, you may not get as much protection as if you had a severe infection. So there are a lot of unknowns there. What we do know, though, with much more certainty is the protection people get from vaccination. That’s why we don’t want to take risks. We want to focus on what we know and know well, which is that vaccines help protect people from COVID. And it’s not a substitute for that reason. Right?”

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“I am incredibly excited is a parent of a five-year-old boy who has been  talking about coronavirus since this all began and once they get vaccinated and I know, look, I, I know I’m Surgeon General, I’m a doctor, but I think about this first and foremost as a parent, right?” saids Murthy. “That’s our most important job in life to take care of our kids and my wife, who’s also a doctor and I have looked at the data really carefully. And here’s how I’ll tell you a little bit about how we thought about this decision. We thought number one, the trials showed that, and these were really thoughtful trials that were done and they showed that the vaccines were really effective in kids, more than 90% effective. The other thing that they showed was that it was remarkably safe. There were no serious adverse effects seen. And when kids did have side effects, they were a sore arm, headache, fatigue that lasted for a day or two and then resolved leaving them with protection. So that was really good news, but here’s the last thing we thought about. There’s a lot of COVID around and our kids may be at risk for getting COVID. If we’re, if we’re not careful and we know COVID is not benign in children, there’s a narrative out there that says that kids don’t have to worry about COVID, but I’ll tell you, we’ve had hundreds of kids who have died from COVID. We’ve had thousands have developed something called multi-system inflammatory syndrome, which affects many organs, including the heart. And we’ve had thousands of kids hospitalized with COVID, you know, as a dad of a child who several years ago was hospitalized and needed emergency surgery. I remember what it was like to be in that emergency room. This is what I need to be sitting by her bedside day and night worried how she was going to do. I would never want that experience for any parent out there. Yeah. That’s why I’m urging all parents to get your questions answered from credible sources, take a close look at the vaccine and hopefully you’ll make the decision to get your child protected from COVID-19.”

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“Look, I know this has been incredibly hard,” said Dr. Murthy. “This last 20 months, all of us have been affected differently, but our lives have been utterly turned upside down in so many ways. And the loss that we’ve experienced can’t be measured only in lives, lost or hospitalizations. It’s also in, in relationships that have been, uh, broken and hurt and, and dreams that have been deferred. It’s been a really, really tough time, but I want people to know one of the most important things we’ve learned from this pandemic is just how important our relationships with each other are. We don’t get through these pandemics without sticking together without helping. If we come out of this pandemic, we’re recognizing that coming out, we come out more unified, more connected to one another and more committed to investing in our relationships. And I think we will come out stronger than we were even before this pandemic began.” So get vaccinated, and to protect your life and the lives of others, don’t visit any of these 35 Places You’re Most Likely to Catch COVID.