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Thomas J. Bollyky is director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University and a senior consultant to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Bollyky is the author of the book Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways and the founder and managing editor of Think Global Health, an online magazine that examines the ways health shapes economies, societies, and everyday lives around the world.
Bollyky’s work has appeared in general interest publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic as well as scholarly journals such as Foreign Affairs, Science, the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Bollyky has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and served on three expert committees at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and as the co-chair of its workshop on globalization and international regulatory harmonization. He directed the first two CFR-sponsored Independent Task Forces devoted to global health: Improving Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons from COVID-19 (2020) and The Emerging Global Health Crisis: Noncommunicable Diseases in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (2014). Bollyky has been a consultant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a temporary legal advisor to the World Health Organization. In 2013, the World Economic Forum named Bollyky as one of its global leaders under forty. Library Journal listed his book Plagues and the Paradox of Progress as one of the top ten selling health and medicine books in 2018.
Prior to coming to CFR, Bollyky served in a variety of positions in the U.S. government, most recently at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). He led the negotiations on medical technology regulation in the U.S.-Republic of Korea Free Trade Agreement and represented USTR in the negotiations with China on the safety of food and drug imports. Bollyky was a Fulbright scholar to South Africa, where he worked as a staff attorney at the AIDS Law Project, and an attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, where he represented clients before the International Court of Justice and the U.S. Supreme Court. Bollyky is a former law clerk to Chief Judge Edward R. Korman and was a health policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Bollyky received his BA in biology and history at Columbia University and his JD at Stanford Law School, where he was the president of the Stanford Law & Policy Review. He is a member of the New York and U.S. Supreme Court bars.
Affiliations:
- Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, senior consultant
- Georgetown University, adjunct professor of law
Featured
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
Current Projects
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The Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program is supported by a generous gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.
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World Health Organization (WHO)
For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the World Health Organization is poised to declare a different disease, monkeypox, to also be a public health emergency of international concern. Since early May 2022, cases of monkeypox—a disease endemic to parts of Africa—have been identified in more than thirty-seven countries where the disease is not normally found. More than three thousand confirmed and suspected cases have been reported. In this Council on Foreign Relations roundtable, Dr. Luciana L. Borio, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dr. Anne Rimoin, Gordon-Levin endowed chair in infectious diseases and public health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, discuss the state of the international monkeypox outbreak, national and multilateral public health responses, prospects for control, access to countermeasures, and the potential implications of this outbreak. -
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught the world anything about public health, it is humility: the United States has as much to learn about public health practices from its foreign counterparts as they have to learn from the United States. This symposium explores ways in which global public health systems can be strengthened, discusses lessons learned from public health officials, and provides a path forward for practitioners and the public during the pandemic and beyond. The full agenda is available here. The Global Health Symposium is made possible through the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies. -
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Public Health Threats and Pandemics
Numerous research studies point to the outsized role that trust has played in the COVID-19 pandemic. Public compliance with expert recommendations for social distancing, mask wearing, school closures, and vaccinations have been linked to the perceived trustworthiness of government, its agencies, and other citizens. In this Council on Foreign Relations roundtable, Dr. Margaret Levi and Dr. Michael Bang Petersen discuss the role of trust in current and future COVID-19 crisis response and what governments can do to build trust before the next health emergency emerges—as it inevitably will. -
Panelists discuss global vaccine distribution efforts, the barriers to achieving vaccine equity, and what this means for global economic recovery.
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Public Health Threats and Pandemics
The 2021 Global Health Symposium on Lessons From Abroad on American Health will discuss how practices from other countries can be applied to current critical health crises in the United States and provide a framework for analysis to help strengthen health systems and guide public health investment strategies. The full agenda is available here. The Global Health Symposium, in partnership with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is made possible through the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies. -
Supply shortages and lackluster distribution rollouts of COVID-19 vaccines have plagued both developed and developing nations, complicating efforts to inoculate populations and reopen economies. As vaccine supply becomes more constrained and virus variants cause greater concern, developed countries are threatening export restrictions and other measures to ensure their populations are vaccinated first. Panelists discuss the potential public health and economic repercussions of this “vaccine nationalism.”
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Public Health Threats and Pandemics
On the one-year anniversary of Think Global Health, CFR’s website devoted to global health, our panelists discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we think about the role of global health in shaping economies, societies, and everyday lives. This meeting is cosponsored with CFR’s Global Health Program. -
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
The coronavirus pandemic has not been an advertisement for the healthy effects of democracy. There have been some notable success stories among democracies, but it is also true that nine out of the ten nations with the highest cumulative COVID-19 cases are democracies. One possibility is that the mechanisms that ordinarily produce better health in democracies—accountability through free and fair elections and freedom of expression—may not function to produce the same result in a pandemic. In this Council on Foreign Relations roundtable, Drs. John Gerring and Ilona Kickbusch discuss this possibility and their work from a new BMJ series on democracy and health. -
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
The United States and the world were unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, despite decades of warnings highlighting the inevitability of global pandemics and the need for international coordination. The crisis is not yet over, and has already exacted a heavy human and economic price. Improving Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons From COVID-19, the report of a CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force, outlines a strategy to ensure the United States and the multilateral system perform better in this crisis—and when the next one inevitably emerges. -
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
As vaccine nationalism rises, the question looms: who gets the vaccine first? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel discusses future vaccine manufacturing, distribution, and roadblocks. -
For the first time in recorded history, bacteria, viruses, and other infectious agents do not cause the majority of deaths or disabilities in any region of the world. However, humankind's progress against infectious diseases has outstripped the pace of investment in good health-care systems, responsive governance, dependable infrastructure, and other more reliable guarantors of health. Thomas Bollyky will discuss how this unbalanced progress has made the world uniquely vulnerable to noncommunicable diseases and novel infections, even as humans grow healthier. The CFR Master Class Series is a biweekly 45-minute session hosted by Vice President and Deputy Director for Studies Shannon O’Neil in which a CFR fellow will take a step back from the news and discuss the fundamentals essential to understanding a given country, region of the world, or issue pertaining to U.S. foreign policy or international relations.
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Foreign Affairs Executive Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan moderates a virtual panel discussion with Thomas J. Bollyky, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy on these questions and more.
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Most countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa are projected to enter a period of sustained low fertility and a decline in the working age populations. Speakers Drs. Natalia Kanem and Christopher Murray discuss the drivers of declining fertility rates in many regions of the world as well as their social, economic, fiscal, and national security implications.
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Drs. Lisa Cooper and Leana Wen discuss the racial inequities that exist in the health care field today and how that impacts the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Panelists discuss India’s vulnerabilities and response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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