Journey

Anita Cicero

• Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins
• Associate Editor of the journal Health Security
• Chair of a WHO Working Group on Dual Use Research of Concern
• Chair of a WHO Working Group tasked with developing recommendations for a governance framework for advanced life science research.

Awa Marie Coll Seck

• Infectious disease and bacteriology-virology specialist
• Serves as Minister of State to the President of the Republic of Senegal
• Chairs the National Committee of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (CN-ITIE)
• President of the Association Galien Africa (AGA)
• Has twice been Minister of Health in Senegal
• Named “Best Minister in the World” in Dubai in February 2017 at the World Government Summit
• Executive Director of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM) (2004-2012)
• Director of the Department of Policy, Strategy and Research of UNAIDS (1996-2001)
• Board of Directors of:
  1. Resolve to Save Lives
  2. AFRIVAC
  3. GAVI-the Vaccine Alliance
  4. Grand Challenges Canada
  5. Exemplars in Global Health
  6. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)
• Member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program (USA)
• Steering committee member of the ANRS | Emerging infectious diseases (France).

‘Are We Ready for A New World Order?’ World Government Summit, March 28-30, 2022

(more on Tabletop Exercises post)

Bill Gates

• As cochair, he shapes and approves foundation strategies and sets the overall direction of the organization.
• As co-owner of WHO pretty much (2nd to Germany), you could sort of see him as “key influencer in public policy in health”; whilst being one of the main profiteers for any vaccine, particularly the ones that he gets governments to fund and distribute on his behalf – he’s a very clever psychopath.
• His fingerprints are on pretty much everything to do with our world from pandemics, climate change, depopulation, owns the science/academia/governments/WHO, and anything to do with censorship and total digital control over the human slaves, including forced vaccines via food and mosquitoes, digital ID, biochips, and you name it, he’s funding it.
• His most profitable and agenda-successful being vaccines. But perhaps agriculture will outperform that now that he’s the biggest farm-owner in America, or perhaps it will be the Digital ID and Social Credit System that will be his biggest gain.
• Just can’t summarize it after 3 years of seeing what he’s involved with. You can browse posts tagged “Bill Gates” to see anything I’ve published about, but there’s more than 1000 things that I haven’t even had a chance, it would be a full time job reporting on what over-reach this menace-psychopath has on our world.

Donald Kaberuka

• Rwandan economist and former Finance Minister
• 7th President of the African Development Bank (2005-2015)
• African Union High Representative for Financing, the Peace Fund and COVID19 response. 
• Member of the Board of Trustees of several organisations and think tanks including:
  1. Rockefeller Foundation
  2. Center for Global Development
  3. Mo Ibrahim Foundation
  4. Brookings Institution
  5. London School of Economics
• Serves on the International Advisory Council of Standard Chartered Bank
• Co-Chair of Council on State Fragility
• Nominated in 2017 to Chair the panel on the third External Evaluation of the International Monetary Fund
• Co-founder, Chairman & Managing Partner of SouthBridge a financial and investment advisory firm
• Elected in 2019 as Chair of the Board of The Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria.

Johanna Hanefeld

• Leads the Centre for International Health Protection at Robert Koch Institute in Berlin – Germany‘s National Public Health Institute.
  • The “Centre for International Health Protection” at the Robert Koch Institute, abbreviated as “ZIG” in German, works with partner countries and international public health actors to strengthen public health systems and to respond to public health emergencies worldwide.
    • ZIG focusses on all public health functions relevant to international health protection: from surveillance, to diagnostic capacity, programme evaluation, operational and implementation research, public health workforce development, emergency structures and processes, and other relevant functions. ^{(01) Centre for International Health Protection (ZIG) https://www.rki.de/EN/Content/Institute/International/ZIG/ZIG_en_node.html}
• Prof for Global Health Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; focused on policy and systems analysis.

Krishnaswamy VijayRaghavan

• Department of Atomic Energy Homi Bhabha Chair
• Professor and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
• Principal Scientific Advisor to the the Government of India. (2018-April 2022)
• Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. (2013-2018)
• Currently studying how sustainable development can be enabled in the context of climate change, global health challenges and the energy crisis.
  • focus is on how the university system in India can be empowered to these tasks
• Elected fellow of The Royal Society (2012)
• Foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
• Foreign member of the American Philosophical Society.

Luis Gomes Sambo

• Medical Doctor, Specialist in Public Health and PhD on Management (Systems Science)
• Served Angola as:
  1. District Medical Officer
  2. Provincial Health Director
  3. Vice Minister of Health
  4. Secretary of State of Health
  5. Minister of Health
• 25 years as a staff-member of the World Health Organization, held the posts of:
  1. WHO Country Representative
  2. Head of the Technical Unit in charge of Health for All and Primary Health Care
  3. Director of the Division in charge of Health Systems and Services Development
  4. Director of Programme Management (1997-2005)
  5. Regional Director of WHO for Africa (2005-2015)
  6. Member of the Systems Thinking Expert Group of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research hosted by WHO
  7. Member of the Global Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health hosted by WHO
• Member of the Recognition Committee of the World Federation of Medical Education
• Research Fellow at the Global Health and Tropical Medicine
• Affiliated to health-related professional, academic and research institutions.

Mike Ryan

• Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme. 
• Forefront of managing acute risks to global health for nearly 25 years.
• Founding member of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.
• Joined WHO in 1996, served as:
  1. Coordinator of Epidemic Response
  2. Operational Coordinator of WHO’s response to the SARS outbreak
  3. WHO’s Director of Global Alert and Response
  4. Assistant Director-General for Emergency Preparedness and Response in WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme.

Mark Dybul

• CEO of Enochian BioSciences
  • Enochian Biosciences is a biotechnology company committed to developing advanced allogenic cell and gene therapies to promote stronger immune system responses potentially for long-term or life-long cancer remission in some of the deadliest cancers, and potentially to treat or cure serious infectious diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. ^{(02) Enochian Biosciences https://www.enochianbio.com/overview/default.aspx (03) Enochian Biosciences, Inc. (ENOB) https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENOB/}
• Professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center
• Worked on HIV and public health for more than 25 years as a clinician, scientist, teacher, and administrator
• Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (Fauci’s baby)
  • as a research fellow under director Dr. Anthony Fauci
    • where he conducted basic and clinical studies on HIV virology, immunology and treatment optimization
  • including the first randomized, controlled trial with combination antiretroviral therapy in Africa. 
• One of the founding architects in the formation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR.
  • Chief Medical officer, Assistant, Deputy and Acting Director
    • Appointed as its leader in 2006
    • U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator
      • Ambassador at the level of an Assistant Secretary of State (until 2009)
• Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria from (2013-2017)
• Member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Muhammad Ali Pate

• Julio Frenk Professor of Public Health Leadership
  • in the Department of Global Health and Population
    • at the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. 
• co-Chair of the Initiative on the Future of Health and Economic Resilience in Africa (FHERA)
• served as global director, health, nutrition and population (HNP) and director, global financing facility (GFF),
  • with the World Bank Group in Washington, DC
• also served as a Richard L. and Ronay Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow
  • at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
• Previously served as minister of state for health, Federal Republic of Nigeria
• Prior to his time at the World Bank, he was chief executive officer of Big Win Philanthropy

Poh Lian Lim

• Chair of the Independent Allocation of Vaccines Group for the COVAX Facility
• Deputy Chair of the WHO Health Security Interface Technical Advisory Group (HSI-TAG)
• Served on the:
  1. Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Steering Committee
  2. Advisory Group on Reform of WHO’s Work
  3. UN Secretary General’s Global Health Crises Taskforce
• Worked on the frontlines of the SARS outbreak in Singapore (2003)
  • Wrote up the NEJM report on the first lab-acquired SARS case
• Worked extensively on outbreak preparedness and response for:
  1. dengue
  2. chikungunya
  3. zika
  4. MERS
  5. COVID-19
  6. pandemic and avian influenza
  7. yellow fever
  8. Ebola
  9. and monkeypox
• Is active in Singapore’s successful COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Tolbert Geewleh Nyenswah

• Senior research associate with the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
• Global public health expert
  • specializes in health policies and systems and public health emergencies preparedness and response
• Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, he was:
  1. the deputy minister of health of Liberia
  2. the director general/chief executive officer of the National Public Health Institute
  3. and the assistant minister of health of the Republic of Liberia during the administration of President Ellen Johns Sirleaf
• Been engaged with several public health emergencies, including as the incident manager of the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, Lassa Fever, Zika, meningitis, and now COVID-19.
  • Some of his major contributions to the COVID-19 response include developing a contact tracing course that has more than 15 million viewers, including 1.3 million enrolled and certified, adapted by all US 50 States. 
• He has been interviewed by multiple African, North American, Asian, European, and South American media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, Business Insider, Bloomberg, USA Today, NPR Radio, BBC, VOA News, World Economic Forum, The Philadelphia Inquirer, VOA Africa, The New Yorker, STAT, and Politico. 
• Member of an expert committee that released a consensus report of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, titled “Public Health Lessons for Non-Vaccine Influenza Interventions, Looking Past COVID-19.” 
• Member of the Global Health Security Index International panel of experts, which assesses the overall health security capacities of 195 nations based on a multitude of health indicators. 
• Was the Head of Liberia Incident Management System Ebola Response
  • joined Bill Gates, Peter Piot, and others
  • in 2015, Mr. Gates convened and chaired an Independent Expert Group (IEG) that discussed lessons learned from the Ebola crisis, following a proposal of the German G7 presidency.
    • The IEG was tasked with developing recommendations for improving global preparedness for potential future epidemics that Chancellor Merkel forwarded to the G7. 
    • The IEG was composed of experts from global public health agencies, international non-governmental organizations, private sector companies, and national governments from the region affected by the Ebola outbreak.
      • A strong policy memo emanated from the IEG on “preparing for the Next Epidemic – A Global Preparedness and Response System” …five years prior to COVID-19. 

Tom Frieden

• Physician trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, public health, and epidemiology.
• Former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • Helped scale up a program in India for effective tuberculosis diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.
  • “Oversaw the work that helped end the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic.”
• Former commissioner of the New York City Health Department.
  • Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s Health Commissioner
• President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives.
  • works with countries to prevent 100 million deaths and to make the world safer from epidemics. 
• During the Covid pandemic, Dr. Frieden has overseen an expansion of Resolve to Save Lives activities including policy and program innovations in the United States, counsel to multilateral institutions, and support for rapid response, health care worker safety, and data-driven decision-making in more than 20 countries. 
• Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tom Inglesby

• Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health
  • Public health preparedness, pandemic and emerging infectious disease, and prevention of and response to biological threats
• Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
  • Joint Appointment in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
• Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Center for Preparedness and Response at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2010-2019).
• Chair of the National Advisory Council of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s National Health Security Preparedness Index
• Served as:
  1. Advisor to US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
  2. US Department of Defense (DoD)
  3. and US Department of Homeland Security on preparedness and response issues. 
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Inglesby has provided technical guidance to response efforts at the global, federal, state, and local level.
  1. Dr. Inglesby served as Senior Advisor on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. 
  2. In 2020, he served on the Biden-Harris transition team reviewing HHS and advising on COVID-19 policy.
  3.  In 2021, Dr. Inglesby served as Senior Policy Advisor for the COVID-19 response in the Office of the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary. 

Leaders must prepare now to make difficult, critically important decisions with limited information in the early days of the next pandemic in order to increase the chances that a dangerous outbreak can be contained at the source. In the early days of a major new contagious disease epidemic, there could be a brief window of opportunity to stop it from becoming a pandemic. To successfully contain such an outbreak, decisive and bold action would need to be taken in the face of incomplete data, high scientific uncertainty, and potential political resistance. Thinking through such challenges, preparing in advance to react effectively, and practicing through both high-level tabletop and operational exercises should start now.

It may seem like all these critical policy decisions have been resolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they have not. In the Catastrophic Contagion simulation, even a group of some of the wisest and most experienced international public health leaders who lived through COVID-19 wrestled with opposing views on whether countries should impose travel restrictions or close schools to try to contain a serious new epidemic that was disproportionately affecting children. The exercise raised a pivotal question: If future pandemics have a much higher lethality than COVID-19, or for example, if they affect predominantly children, would or should countries take different, stronger, earlier measures to contain it, and what are those measures?   

These are not purely public health and scientific decisions; they will be made by leaders in the context of political, economic, and social realities that can be anticipated and considered in advance. Through routine simulations and operational exercises, we can strategically prepare for such challenges ahead of time. The more effectively we can reach scientific and practical consensus on the best approach to very hard but foreseeable problems, the more we will be ready in the future to protect lives and national economies. Political leaders, in addition to health leaders, must be at the table during exercises to respond effectively during the next pandemic.

Countries should establish a global network of professional public health leaders who can work together to improve epidemic preparedness and response and strive for consensus on scientific issues in advance of the next major outbreak. There is no existing worldwide professionalized network of public health preparedness and response leaders who can work together between and during epidemics to better prepare all countries and provide mutual aid and sharing of best practices during serious epidemics. Establishing an international network of national public health leaders, along the lines of the professionalized “Pandemic Corps” referred to in our exercise, could substantially help countries save lives and livelihoods during major epidemics and recover more quickly. Political leaders, who are entrusted with keeping their citizens safe, could benefit from consensus views offered by such a group, rather than having to make impromptu, high consequence policy decisions when lives are at stake during dangerous outbreaks.

Countries should prioritize efforts to increase trust in government and public health; improve public health communication efforts; increase the resiliency of populations to misleading information; and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation. In future pandemics, we should continue to expect even more major disruptions from misinformation and disinformation. The WHO can be a globally trusted source, and it can share science and public health information widely, but we should not expect it alone to combat or put a stop to the spread of this mis- and disinformation. Countries need to collaborate to anticipate that threat and prepare to combat it with their own laws and procedures. Just as many types of economic and societal harms can be anticipated and accounted for in pandemic preparedness plans, so too can predictable false or misleading health messaging. Concertedly exploring ways to address this phenomenon on a national level in advance of the next pandemic will be crucial to saving lives.

WHO member states should strengthen international systems for sharing and allocating scarce public health resources. Groundbreaking global collaborations, such as the ACT-Accelerator and COVAX, were launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, public health leaders still lack confidence in current approaches to fairly allocate medical countermeasures during a future pandemic. Even if there were a global commitment around equity for all countries, implementing equitable allocation will continue to be very difficult in the future, especially if there are practical challenges and special requirements like refrigeration or IV administration. Empowering all regions of the world to save lives during a pandemic would increase equitable access to life-saving treatments and vaccines. Therefore, we need to build up manufacturing, distribution, and administration capacities around the world, paying particular attention to countries with poor infrastructure. This should happen now, rather than during a growing pandemic.

It is clear from Catastrophic Contagion that even after the terrible impact of COVID-19, more preparedness work needs to be done, new decisions need to be made, and additional resources committed. We need to expand the limits of our ability to respond.