Take as Directed

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison speaks with Dr. Trevor Mundel, President of the Global Health Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They discuss the arc of Dr. Mundel’s personal career and his remarkable tenure at the Gates Foundation, including the creation of the Medical Research Institute; the launch of CHAMPS, the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Service; and the establishment of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. In closing, they discuss the issues that give him the greatest concern, and the reasons he is hopeful looking to the future.

In this episode of Take as Directed, host Janet Fleischman sits down with Geeta Rao Gupta, executive director of the 3D Program for Girls and Women, former president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), and former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF. They discuss the new series of The Lancet, of which Geeta was a principal author, that outlines the impact of gender norms and inequalities on health, describes persistent barriers to progress, and provides an agenda for action. They also discuss the recent Women Deliver conference in Vancouver and how to maintain optimism for the future.

In this episode of Take as Directed, Sara Allinder is joined by special guest host Haim Malka, Deputy Director and Senior Fellow of the CSIS Middle East Program, to discuss the future of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The two interview Dr. Akihiro Seita, Director of Health and WHO Special Representative for UNRWA, and Elizabeth Campbell, Director of UNRWA’s Washington D.C. office, about their concerns for Palestinian refugees’ health as humanitarian aid declines amid continuing political uncertainty in the region.

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison speaks with Dr. Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They discuss why vaccine confidence is currently in crisis, and how this has fueled outbreaks such as measles and the persistence of polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Plus, Dr. Larson walks through her work with the Vaccine Confidence Project, including monitoring public confidence in immunization programs and building an information surveillance system for early detection of public concerns around vaccines.

In this episode of Take as Directed, Steve Morrison speaks with Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. Dr. Murray walks through IHME’s ongoing Global Burden of Disease analysis, as he and his team have been evaluating eating habits and food systems for people in 195 countries. Dr. Murray shares the study’s most important—and surprising—findings about global diet-related issues.

As the decade of vaccines comes to a close, public health experts are busy developing new strategies for the next era of global immunization. Among those efforts is a second version of the Global Vaccine Action Plan — or GVAP — which will cover the period 2021 to 2030. In this episode of Take as Directed, GHPC Senior Fellow Nellie Bristol sits down with Kate Dodson, Vice President of Global Health at the United Nations Foundation; Carmen Tull, Chief of the Child Health and Immunizations Division at USAID; and Craig Burgess, Senior Technical Officer at John Snow Training and Research Institute, to discuss the GVAP 2.0 process and explain why global goals are important to US efforts in improving immunization coverage.

Investing in nutrition is one of the most cost effective health and development programs, yet is often underprioritized in the larger global development agenda. In this episode of Take as Directed, Sara Allinder speaks with Shawn Baker, Director of the Nutrition team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss how the arc of Vitamin A supplementation fits into the larger story of global health, the need to reinvigorate programs that have stalled, and Shawn’s hopes for long-term, systems-based interventions that can sustain progress.

At the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong last fall, Professor He Jiankui made a controversial announcement that he had made heritable genetic changes in human embryos, which resulted in the birth of twin girls. This action has been universally condemned and has sparked intense international debate over whether human germline genome editing should be permitted, and what regulatory or governance framework is needed. In this episode of Take as Directed, host Steve Morrison sits down with Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine, which was one of the conveners of the summit in Hong Kong. Dr. Dzau is a prominent leader in the current conversation as the scientific community seeks the best way forward.

March 24th was World TB Day, a World Health Organization-designated day of advocacy to raise awareness about the devastating health, social, and economic consequences of tuberculosis. In this episode of Take as Directed, host Steve Morrison is joined by Dr. Eric Goosby, the UN Special Envoy on Tuberculosis. Dr. Goosby recently led a Lancet Commission on tuberculosis, a two-year effort that has culminated in a longform report titled “Building a tuberculosis-free world”, and spoke about some of the main findings of the report and what the next steps are in creating a world free of TB.

Women’s health services, including maternal health and family planning, are critical to enable women and girls to access economic empowerment opportunities. In this episode of Take as Directed, GHPC Senior Associate Janet Fleischman speaks with Margaret Schuler, Senior Vice President of the International Programs Group at World Vision, and David Ray, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at CARE. The three discuss how the current bipartisan momentum around economic empowerment for women provides an opportunity to strengthen linkages with U.S. investments in women’s global health.