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Think Global Health
President Trump sent U.S. troops to the border with Mexico to supplement the work of authorities there. President Biden pledges a new approach as pressures mount along the boundary.
About the Expert
Expert Bio
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. 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:
- Georgetown University, adjunct professor of law
- National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Committee on Mutual Recognition Agreements and Reliance in the Regulation of Medicines, member
Featured
Public Health Threats and Pandemics
Global health expert Thomas J. Bollyky explores the paradox in our fight against infectious disease: the world is getting healthier in ways that should make us worry.
Health and infectious diseases have shaped the history of urbanization, but it is cities that will define the future of global health.
Population growth and aging are fueling a spectacular rise in noncommunicable diseases, such as cancers and cardiovascular diseases, in poor countries that are ill-prepared to handle them.
Current Projects
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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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Over three million U.S. teens reported e-cigarette use in 2018, nearly double the prior year. A mysterious lung disease associated with vaping killed has nineteen people and injured hundreds. Congress and the president promise regulatory action, but some health advocates argue the backlash threatens the potential for e-cigarettes to make traditional cigarettes obsolete and improve the health of millions. This roundtable, part of the Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series, is a discussion on e-cigarette regulation internationally and its lessons for U.S. policymakers.
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In 1968, two recent U.S. medical school graduates working in Dhaka, Bangladesh, developed oral rehydration solution—a mixture of water, sugar, and salt—that the British medical journal the Lancet has hailed “potentially the most important medical advance of the twentieth century.” These two doctors, Richard Cash, senior lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and David Nalin, professor emeritus at the Center for Immunology and Microbial Diseases at Albany Medical College, discussed the fifty-year legacy of their invention and the lessons that legacy offers to the health challenges emerging in lower income nations today.
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The symposium held on April 16, 2019 explored the changing relationship of trade and health. The event convened experts to discuss the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and other noncommunicable diseases rising in poor nations, as well as the overuse of existing antibiotics and underinvestment in new ones threatening to bring about a post-antibiotic era. The panels examined the deep tensions between health, trade, and commercial interests generated by efforts to confront these health concerns. The event was sponsored by CFR's Global Health Program with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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Panelists will discuss the links between democratic governance and global health.
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The future of global health is urban. There are 4.2 billion city dwellers worldwide, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s population. The population of city dwellers globally is projected to grow by 2.5 billion by 2050, with nearly 90 percent in lower-income nations in Africa and Asia. The evidence suggests that urban residents have better health than their rural counterparts but that the advantages of urban life are unevenly distributed. Too little attention has been given to the essential role of health-care delivery, especially among poorer and more vulnerable populations. With shared challenges, there is an opportunity for health-care providers to low-income populations in different nations to learn from one another. The featured speakers for this discussion were Alex Ezeh, professor of global health at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and Nilesh Kalyanaraman, chief health officer at Health Care for the Homeless in Baltimore.
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CFR Senior Fellow Thomas J. Bollyky discusses his new book, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World Is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways.