The State of the 'Tripledemic'; Influential Union Head Talks Housing and Healthcare; Fusion Breakthrough; Shop Listener 2022 Edition: Day 3

• The flu, RSV and COVID are all circulating at high levels and the CDC and some municipalities (including NYC) are now recommending indoor masking. Jessica Malaty Rivera, infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, senior advisor at Pandemic Prevention Initiative, discusses the state of all the respiratory viruses, how they are affecting hospital capacity and more related health news.
• Manny Pastreich, president of 32BJ SEIU, shares policy priorities and wins for the influential union, including on re-zonings, housing development, and healthcare costs.
• Arthur Turrell, deputy director for research and economics at the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics (ONS) Data Science Campus, a visitor to the plasma physics group at Imperial College London, and the author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet (Scribner, 2021), talks about the reports of a breakthrough in the pursuit of nuclear fusion which promises a cleaner source of energy.
• Shop Listener is back for a new holiday season. Listeners call in to shout out their businesses ahead of the holidays for a Brian Lehrer Show listener-sourced gift guide.

Transcripts are posted to each segment as soon as they are available.