Global Health Security and Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century

BOLLYKY: Good morning. Well, welcome to today’s symposium on Global Health Security and Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century. We’re so pleased to have you. This symposium is co-hosted with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Global Health Security and Diplomacy Bureau at the U.S. Department of State.

I’m Tom Bollyky. I direct the Global Health Program here at the Council on Foreign Relations.

I think there are three takeaways you should take from today’s packed and totally amazing agenda. The first is that the effort to ensure global health security remains a focus of our regular diplomatic discourse, remains a high priority even as COVID-19—the crisis wanes.

You can see that from the terrific speakers we have today—multiple U.S. Cabinet officials, leaders of intergovernmental institutions and regional alliances, high-level representatives of foreign governments, CEOs, leading practitioners, civil society luminaries.

The second takeaway I would draw from today’s agenda is that global health security is very much a wide-ranging affair, drawing the engagement of many governments, institutions, companies, alliances, and NGOs, as it should. Pandemic proofing the future is a team sport and today you’ll have the opportunity to hear from some of the leading players....

CARTER: Well, good morning, everyone. It’s really a pleasure to be here with you. Welcome to Session Two for the Symposium on Global Health Security and Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century. My name is Hillary Carter, and I will serve as the moderate for this session, which is focused on “The Power of Partnerships in Collaboration to Advance Global Health Security.”

I’m joined by an incredible group of panelists who represent diverse organizations that are critical to advancing global health security. And it’s my pleasure to briefly introduce our panelists. First, on the screen, we have Dr. Jarbas Barbosa, who is the director of the Pan American Health Organization. Welcome. We have Dr. Joy St. John, who is the executive director of the Caribbean Public Health Agency. We have Dr. Ayoade Alakija, who is the World Health Organization’s special envoy for Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Welcome. And then joining us here in the room we have Ms. Rachel King, who is the president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. And we have Dr. Jean Kaseya, who is the director-general of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So I’ll start with a little bit of framing, but want to...

BOLLYKY: Great. Well, welcome to panel three. We will be talking about “Future Priorities for Global Health Coordination.”

Frankly, the need for coordination on global health is intuitive. We’re talking about threats that do not know national boundaries. But the reality is, is that coordination has not always been evident. That was especially true in the early days of the pandemic, and also especially true on the distribution and production of countermeasures against COVID-19. And the anger and the legacy of that lack of coordination still reverberate, really, through global health, and are a topic that we deal with in thinking about the future priorities for coordination.

We are blessed to have a(n) all-star panel today to discuss these issues, including many friends and all people I admire. In the interest of time, I am going to introduce them only by their current titles. I hope they and you will forgive me for not delving into their very impressive backgrounds. I’m going to start with the people in the room and then move on online.

To my immediate left is Peter Hotez. He is the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of...

DENTZER: Welcome back, everyone. I’m Susan Dentzer, president and chief executive officer of America’s Physician Groups and a Council member, and I’m delighted to lead our conversation with global health ambassadors.

At this point in the day, it’s probably a good idea to try to pull together some of the threads of the conversation this morning so far. Obviously, in the context of speaking about global health, security, and diplomacy, as we heard from Tony Fauci, we need to recognize that health is security and security is health. With that very simple construct, however, we know we plunge immediately into some very multifaceted issues. And we heard about those. In fact, Tony Fauci told us there were twenty-five lessons from the COVID pandemic, and he was able to get through two of them in his conversation with us. Important, too, but obviously we had twenty-three left to go. So that’s kind of emblematic of this conversation, for better, for worse.

I took away certainly two key themes from this morning. One is the importance of reauthorizing PEPFAR. As Tony said, we need to go around shaming the world—and including starting here in Washington, D.C.—shaming individuals for not continuing...

MONAHAN: So we have—to say the least, we have a daunting challenge over the next forty-five minutes that tie together three of the biggest collective action problems in the world: climate change, global health, the future of the disease priorities such as HIV, malaria, other specific disease programs, all through the lens of health equity.

So it’s a small topic but we have a terrific group. (Laughter.) We have some of the best people in the world to help us think this through with a special eye to the role that the U.S. government can play to drive synergy in the—that brings together the health and climate agenda.

So here’s how we’re going to try to do this because we’ve got a lot to cover and we have some spectacular people. Each of our speakers has been asked to take up to two minutes to do a sort of high-level view of their take on this issue.

We’ll then do some specific questions for our speakers and then we’ll reserve time if we can for as many questions from the audience as possible.

So we’re going to go a little out of the sequence on your...

ADZOGENU: A very good afternoon to you all and to those joining internationally and around the world. I believe it’s good—even, you know, good morning, depending on where you are. My name is Edem Adzogenu. I’m co-chair of AfroChampions. AfroChampions is a multistakeholder public-private innovative platform driving integration among institutions in Africa on common projects.

I’ve been given the very unique task of moderating a very interesting session. We’ve been having a lot of discussion about what to do in terms of global security, but resource mobilization—financing—is a very important one. I always say that great ideas, great innovations without financing is hallucinations. This task I have is to introduce to you very distinguished personalities to speak on the subject matter of financing, most of them coming from philanthropy—global philanthropy and DFIs, and to try to dig into their pockets and world to see how they can contribute a lot more beyond what they are doing currently in support of global health security.

I will start with introducing Professor Oramah. Professor Oramah is the president and chairman of Afreximbank. Afreximbank has been very instrumental in supporting the continent of Africa during the pandemic.

But before I go...

WEN: Good afternoon. So I have the honor of presiding over the last session of the day and to introduce a fantastic panel both in person here and virtually. So I’m Leana Wen. I’m a columnist with the Washington Post and a professor at George Washington University, and I will be moderating this very distinguished panel of five people.

I know that we have talked about this throughout the day of how we have many wonderful panelists on each panel and they know to do this in TV-style comments in terms of length of responses, but what I’m going to do is to introduce briefly our distinguished panelists. I’ll introduce them in turn and then ask them for their opening remarks on working across agencies to address reforms to global health security infrastructure. I would like them to touch upon the importance of doing so, best practices, and also to consider, as we have been throughout today, about how COVID has changed the landscape in terms of changing—in terms of changing, or not, our thoughts about these necessary reforms.

So I’m first going to start with Dr. Paul Friedrichs, who is the director of the Office of Pandemic...