Take as Directed

Dan Diamond, Washington Post reporter on the White House and health care, shares his reflections on President Trump’s swirling passions to reshape Washington’s built environment, with intense controversy surrounding the ballroom. What’s driving this, and where is it headed? On health, Dan reflects on where the Trump administration is heading, 16 months into its second term. Chris Klomp, the new CO...

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, offers her reflections on HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s tenure over the past fifteen months. His vaccine agenda has always been an “outlier”—“an unpopular agenda”—yet it remains at the core of his identity. He has now “hit a wall.” Casey Means’ nomination to be U.S. Surgeon General is stalled; the recruitment of a CDC Director is stalled; Judge Murphy ha...

Since January 2025, the United States has confirmed more than 3,000 cases of measles across multiple states - with South Carolina reporting nearly 1000 cases in just the first two months of 2026. The economic costs of these outbreaks pose a burden to local and state health agencies through hospitalizations, surveillance, and contact tracing, among other measures. Cases of pertussis are similarly h...

Gilead Sciences, the Trump administration, and the Global Fund have joined in partnership to bring lenacapavir, the new twice-yearly injectable prevention tool against HIV/AIDS, to two million persons at-risk in ten African countries in three years. Emily Gibbons, Gilead Sciences, explains the back story—the determined work of the previous two and a half years to plan an effective launch that woul...

This episode of The CommonHealth features a discussion of the recently published book, Deployed: A Physician on the Front Lines of Global Health, by Kevin M. De Cock.  In Deployed, De Cock details an insider’s perspective confronting infectious disease crises from the AIDS pandemic to Ebola to Covid-19. He explores the intersections between medicine, global public health, and epidemiology througho...

Andi L. Fristedt, former senior official at CDC, FDA and the Senate HELP Committee, heads up a newly established Washington, D.C. office of the Parkinson’s Foundation. The Foundation acts in close allegiance with Michael J. Fox and his foundation; advocates; scientific and policy leaders such as Professors Okun and Dorsey; and new voices such as Harvard Professor Sue Goldie. It supports research o...

Keith Poulsen, professor at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, provides an update on the status of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), as pertains to dairy cattle, poultry, wildlife—and humans. Are we making progress in biosecurity in the dairy industry? Dairy may be decades behind, but keep in mind: “Cows are like walking tanks.” Keep...

Over the past year, outbreaks of measles, a highly transmissible virus, have affected thousands of unvaccinated people across Canada, Mexico and the United States. With more than 5,000 cases and sustained transmission during 2025, Canada lost its measles elimination status in October. And the United States and Mexico could lose elimination certification later this year. To what extent are current...

Jane Halton, chair of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, walks us through CEPI's evolution since its founding in early 2017, and the launch on February 14, at the Munich Security Conference, of CEPI 3.0, fitted to the current era of heightened threat of dangerous bioevents, scarcer resources, and a pivot to security partners, including NATO.

John-Arne Røttingen, CEO of Wellcome Trust, is a Norwegian leader whose expertise has a remarkable span, encompassing medicine, science, research, clinical trials, negotiations, diplomacy, philanthropy, financing of global health, and governance of international institutions. He shares with us his assessment of what prior factors, during and post-Covid, set the stage for the shocks of 2025; the im...

Keith Humphreys, a leading expert on addiction psychiatry, based at Stanford University, unpacks his January article in Science examining the steep reduction in overdoses deaths—between May 2023 and the end of 2024—in the United States and Canada. It likely stemmed from a supply shock, linked to steps taken by China to disrupt the supply of fentanyl and precursor chemicals. Underneath, US-China di...

Amb. (ret) Karl Hofmann is CEO of the recently launched Health X Partners (HXP), a parent company under which Population Services International (PSI) and the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AID Foundation (EGPAF) now operate. He explains his personal story—from a successful diplomatic path centered in Africa to a pivot and second career as President and CEO of PSI starting in 2007. And he explains the...

Dr. Chris Murray, IHME, co-chairs the Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, which will launch its report in February at the Munich Security Conference. It is the “Commission of Commissions,” a novel, highly ambitious three-year effort to forecast what are to be the biggest, most costly problems by taking a broadened non-traditional view. It focuses on 16 factors plus hyperten...

In the second episode of the Prevention Intention mini-series, Katherine speaks with Wafaa El-Sadr, University Professor in Epidemiology at Columbia University and the director of ICAP. They discuss El-Sadr’s formative experience treating AIDS patients in New York City in the early 1980s, as the global HIV epidemic began to emerge; her decision to found ICAP in order to bring HIV treatments to pat...

In the first episode of the Prevention Intention mini-series, a series featuring conversations with leading female HIV clinical researchers, Katherine speaks with Linda-Gail Bekker, a medical doctor and director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the University of Cape Town.  They discuss Bekker's decision to focus her work on HIV as well as her involvement in the PURPOSE 1 clinical trials, which d...

Erika Elvander served her country as a federal career health diplomat for 27 years, including as the U.S. Health Attache in Beijing from the spring 2021 until the end of 2024. Her Asia passion ignited while a student in Hong Kong and traveler to Beijing in the late 1980s. And carried forward for the following decades. As Health Attache in Beijing during COVID, she witnessed China “digging in,” pur...

Marian Wentworth, President & CEO, Management Sciences for Health (MSH), at age 13 started working in a local factory. Attended the famous Latin School in Chicago. Studied math at Harvard. Then joined Merck as it was "growing ferociously fast." Stayed 27 years, grew and led the vaccine business to $6 billion. Was the "quant jock." Spearheaded the launch of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. Then pivoted t...

Listen to the recent CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Health Security discussion with Congressman Adam Smith (WA-09), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, on his experience leading a Congressional delegation to China in late September 2025. Rep. Smith’s bipartisan delegation—the first House delegation to travel to China since 2019—pressed for high-level military-to-military dialogue b...

Dr. Rick Brennan, an acclaimed Australian humanitarian leader who led WHO and NGO crisis response in multiple conflicts over several decades, walks us through his personal story. He then unpacks the scale and gravity of what is now unfolding in Darfar—featuring the “F word” (famine), the “G word”( genocide, affirmed by the US Senate), and the “C word” (cholera). The crisis requires political actio...

Listen to the recent CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Global Health Security book launch of Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity by Seth Berkley. As the gravity and magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent in the first half of 2020, how did the vision for a mechanism to ensure equitable access to new vaccines come together and what role did o...

Keizo Takemi, recent Japan Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare (September 2023-October 2024), shares his personal story that took him to Taiwan, CNN/Japan, the Diet, Harvard, back to the Diet, and recently into the cabinet of then Prime Minister Kishida. Along the way he became a leading force in charting Japan's approach to global health. As Minister he put a spotlight on the thousands of sing...

Dr. Debra Houry joined the podcast, following her resignation from CDC on August 25, upon the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, and shortly after her September 17 testimony before the Senate HELP Committee. What does she make of President Trump’s September 22 press conference on Tylenol, its alleged connection to autism, and the potential use of leucovorin? While serving as CDC’s senior most l...

The renowned global health leader, Peter Piot, LSHTM, opens this conversation with reflections on what drove the historic global health successes, including “a brilliant coalition” and U.S. bipartisan leadership grounded in statecraft and strategic thinking. That “twenty-five years of historical anomaly” has however now ended. In Europe, that shift has resulted from populism combined with intense...

Listen to the recent CSIS Bipartisan Alliance for Health Security book launch of The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. As bad as Covid-19 was, the next pandemic could be worse. While the world learns to live with Covid-19 and continues to recover from its worst effects, how do we prepare for the next pandemic lurking around the corner?   The event includes a panel moderated...

Dr. Celine Gounder, Editor-at-Large, KFF Health News, explains how the U.S. vaccine enterprise could be damaged so swiftly by the Trump administration, with so little apparent resistance: it was a "shock and awe" blitz, while hesitation and fear dominated. "Silence was paralysis." It is too early to estimate the true scope of damage. The middle tier of professionals in government and scientific re...