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.
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 CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force devoted to global health, entitled The Emerging Global Health Crisis: Noncommunicable Diseases in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. 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
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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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.
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Pollution kills nine million people each year and sickens many more, mostly in poorer nations. The global health effects of climate change are less well quantified, but also increasing with lower-income countries again bearing the brunt of greater food insecurity, increased rates of chronic respiratory illnesses, and shifts in malarial zones. CFR’s Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series held a discussion on the global health nexus between climate change and pollution and how a more coherent approach to these issues can advance progress at a time when some policymakers, especially in the United States, are unmoved by the environmental, health, and economic consequences expected in the coming decades. The featured speaker for this discussion was Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and recent co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health.
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Nearly forty years ago, Jon Rohde wrote a paper that argued that the “road to health has shortcuts,” advocating a strategy of expanded childhood immunization that helped inspire the UNICEF and World Health Organization campaign to improve child survival. In recent years, the field of global health has been moving away from donor-funded international initiatives on individual diseases, and toward mostly domestically-financed investments in universal healthcare, quality health systems, and achieving health for all. The role of philanthropy in this transition remains a work in progress. This meeting of CFR's Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series held a discussion of that role and whether technology-driven, community-focused initiatives might still offer shortcuts on the long road to better health. The featured speaker for this discussion was Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation.
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Cell Phones Without Factories: A Conversation with Tyler Cowen on International Economic Development
Tyler Cowen discusses the prospects for a “cell phones instead of automobile factories” model of economic growth and prosperity. -
Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, discusses poor world megacities, the reasons their growth differs from previous patterns of urbanization, and the implications for their residents and the world at large as part of the Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series.
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Steve Davis, president and CEO of PATH, and Richard Hatchett, acting director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) discuss spurring the development and delivery of medical tools to prepare for emerging infectious disease outbreaks as part of the Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series.
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Joshua Sharfstein of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University join CFR’s Thomas Bollyky to discuss the role that generic drug regulation might play in addressing off-patent pharmaceutical pricing concerns.
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In 2014, Mexico, which has a higher rate of adult obesity than the United States, became one of the first countries to implement a nationwide soda tax. Dr. Juan Rivera of the National Institutes of Public Health of Mexico joins CFR’s Thomas Bollyky to discuss the early results from the first year of that tax and its implications for the use of soda taxes in other countries and cities.
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Lord Jim O’Neill, chair of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, joins CFR’s Thomas Bollyky to discuss the economic drivers and consequences of antimicrobial resistance and the role of global cooperation in confronting this challenge.