Take as Directed

Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, shares his trenchant insights into this confusing moment of transition in the global response to Covid-19. What should be the priorities and the principles to guide action? How to take account of the profound changes in the pandemic, while not losing focus on equity? Please give a listen!

On this 147th episode, we are offering the fireside chat, held on August 30 at CSIS, at which CDC Director Rochelle Walensky laid out her newly announced reform agenda, moderated by Julie Gerberding and Tom Inglesby. Julie is former director of the CDC and current director of the Foundation of the National Institutes of Health, and co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health...

On this 146th episode, Dr. Chris Murray, IHME, delivers several sharp messages. Tracking Covid is increasingly difficult, a function of both underreporting of cases and overreporting of incidental hospital admissions. Studies are emerging which suggest that protection against severe ill and death may be waning after 20 weeks. Without far better data on hospital admissions, however, we are “flying...

Dan Diamond, Washington Post, joins J. Stephen Morrison, CSIS, for a tour d’horizon of rapidly unfolding Monkeypox developments: How to explain the early egregious USG stumbles? Are we correcting course in testing, vaccines, and therapies rapidly and effectively enough to head off the entrenchment of Monkeypox? Does the math surrounding vaccines and demand add up? Or are we sailing into a profound...

Dr. Marci Nielsen, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Resolve to Save Lives, joins J. Stephen Morrison for episode 144. For an 18 month period beginning in the fall of 2020, Dr. Nielsen served as Chief Advisor for COVID-19 Coordination for Kansas Governor, Laura Kelly, where she led outreach efforts across the state to advance dialogue, access to data, and transparency. Regular public fora...

Dr. Celine Gounder, senior fellow & editor-at-large for public health at KFF's Kaiser Health News, joins J. Stephen Morrison and Andrew Schwartz for this 143rd episode. Monkeypox has spread beyond the endemic regions, and is rapidly becoming a pandemic. It has already become de facto politicized in the United States because of the community affected, but monkeypox per se is not a gay disease and I...

Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, Research Director of the Global Public Policy and Social Change Program, Harvard School of Medicine, joins J. Stephen Morrison for Episode 142. Her mentor Dr. Paul Farmer, who recently passed, inspired her with his exhortation to “do hard things together” even when the odds are against you. Her project, the Covid Academy, is developing a locally-informed model for standardi...

Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter at The New York Times, joins J. Stephen Morrison and H. Andrew Schwartz for this 141st episode. Apoorva unpacks the sudden spread of Monkeypox into Europe and now the United States, outside African states where it is endemic, and the challenges this poses to Americans and Europeans weary of Covid-19, as well as to Africans who fear gross ine...

Dr. Jeffrey Gold, Chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), joins J. Stephen Morrison for this 140th episode. How did UNMC evolve over the past decades to become such a lead national institution in advancing America’s health security, through its Global Center for Health Security? In 1997, UNMC created a public health lab with the state of Nebraska, followed by 2004-2005 with...

In this 139th episode, Dr. Deborah Birx joins J. Stephen Morrison to discuss her new book, Silent Invasion. On that day, former President Trump responded to the book by, among other things, lamenting oddly that “Debbie Birx does not have a lot of dresses.” In her inside account, Deborah details the repeated failures both to acknowledge the power of silent transmission by fully vaccinated, asymptom...

In this episode, Andrew Schwartz and J. Stephen Morrison are joined by Victor Cha to discuss the Covid-19 outbreak in North Korea - which CSIS predicted back in March, the impact of the pandemic on the unvaccinated country, and the road ahead amidst ongoing health and food crises worsened by an extreme lockdown.

Yana Panfilova, a 24-year-old Ukrainian woman born with HIV, fled Kyiv shortly after Russia’s invasion and is currently based in Berlin with her mother, grandmother and cat. Eight years ago, she helped found Teenergizer, an organization supported by UNAIDS that seeks to end discrimination against youth in Ukraine living with HIV. Over time, its scope widened to include other youth groups and its s...

Yasmeen Abutaleb, health policy reporter at The Washington Post, joins Steve Morrison and Andrew Schwartz for this 136th episode. The Biden administration struggles on multiple fronts, from systemic dysfunction within agencies to increased polarization of virtually every measures to mitigate Covid-19. The administration wants to invest in a long-term vaccine strategy that protects against multiple...

Dr. Dylan George is the Director of Operations for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), newly established at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. George joins J. Stephen Morrison and Andrew Schwartz for this 135th episode following the April 19th White House CFA launch. Its mission: Predict, Inform, Innovate. Its data science team will strengthen advance war...

Dr. Larry Gostin is a professor of global health law and the faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Dr. Gostin joins Steve Morrison and Andrew Schwartz for this 134th episode in the aftermath of the April 18 nationwide injunction to block government mask mandates on public transportation. In Judge Mizelle’s opinion, the C.D.C. has exc...

Dr. Yanzhong Huang is Professor at Seton Hall University's School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Senior Fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-chair of the US-China Working Group of the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security.  He joined Steve Morrison in the our 133rd episode for a wide-ranging conversation: on China’s huge immunity gap;...

Dr. Beth Cameron, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the White House, joins Steve for Episode #132. The Biden administration is making progress on the Global Health Security and Pandemic Preparedness Fund, envisioned as a Financial Intermediary Fund at the World Bank. The fund will invest in a globally linked bio-surveillance and earl...

The Washington Post's Dan Diamond returns for Episode #131. Public attitudes towards Covid-19 have changed, and the pandemic has become a lower political priority. "It's been a steady saga of lack of action compounded by different political priorities swamping Covid." Midterms are coming up, and candidates want to show that there are other issues they are attentive to: inflation and crime. Republi...

Dr. Matt Hepburn of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy joins Steve and CSIS Senior Associate Tom Cullison for this 130th episode. Beginning as an Army infectious disease researcher and DARPA project manager, Dr. Hepburn’s visionary leadership was instrumental in the rapid availability of Covid vaccines through Operation Warp Speed. The world continues to face catastrophic cons...

In this 129th episode, Steve joined in frank conversation with University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank as she approaches the conclusion of a nine-year tenure that dramatically tested her leadership and the university itself. There is considerable progress -- an increased graduation rate, shorter time to graduation, student debt reduction, improved diversity. The financial foundati...

Two years later, Dr. Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations rejoins Steve for the second iteration of our Live From Munich mini-series. Dr. Hatchett reminds us that having just had a pandemic does not prevent outbreak from another, and that pandemic preparedness needs to be “viewed as a security challenge, not as a health challenge, not as a development challe...

In this 127th episode, an edited version of a live event recorded on March 2, Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, joins Steve for a fireside chat. Scott Kirby has been a health security leader in the private sector, achieving a 99.7% employee vaccination rate in eight weeks. The Covid-19 pandemic forced a major change in internal culture “about leading, about doing the right thing, about a custom...

In the fourth episode of our Live From Munich Mini-Series, Steve is joined by Tom Bollyky, the Senior Fellow for Global Health, Economics, and Development and Director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Bollyky attended the Munich Security Conference “to keep the conversation about the response to the COVID crisis still on the national security agenda”. National...

Two years ago, Dr. Jeremy Farrar joined Steve for the first iteration of Live From Munich, when the Covid-19 Pandemic was just emerging. Today, for episode #125 and the third installment of this Live From Munich mini-series, he returns to discuss this murky transition into the next stage of the pandemic. Dr. Farrar predicts that “political interest will wane from the pandemic because other events...

In episode #124, the second episode of our Live From Munich mini-series, Steve is joined by Seth Berkely, CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, “the largest purchaser of vaccines in the world”. He speaks on strengthening health security: “Do we prepare for our hopeful future? Or do we prepare for reality?” “The right thing to do is to continue to prepare for worsening variants, worsening disease. And...