The Global Health Politics Podcast

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. Until last year, Dr. Daskalakis served as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In August 2025, he resigned along with a number of other longtime senior CDC officials over concerns that the CDC was moving in directions that were counter to their understanding of science and ethical values. The two discuss Dr. Daskalakis' experience responding to HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and mpox; his decision to resign from the CDC; and how public health can preserve scientific integrity, community trust, and emergency-response capacity amid politicization and institutional weakening of the CDC.

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Monica Wang, an award-winning researcher whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and National Geographic. Dr. Wang currently serves as Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health. Her new book - The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health - is a personal, story-driven account of how social and structural factors, like income, race and ethnicity, neighborhood, and social networks - shape our health and well-being. They discuss the book, her motivations for writing it, collective responsibility, and politics and misinformation.

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with William and Mary Professor Brent Kaup and Lehigh Professor Kelly Austin to discuss their new book, The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease. Their exciting and insightful new book takes readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda to illustrate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. In the process, we learn about the challenges of writing the book during COVID-19, the changing landscape of sociology, and how the authors think about research. 

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At a moment when the world is grappling with an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that is spiraling out of control, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Mardia Stone. Dr. Stone served as Ebola Response Team Coordinator at the WHO and Senior Advisor to the Incident Manager of Liberia's national Ebola response. She is author of Collapse and Resiliency: The Inside Story of Liberia's Unprecedented Ebola Response. Written with Tolbert Nyenswah, Collapse and Resiliency is the only book written by an African official on the Ebola response.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with anthropologist Susan Erikson. They talk about her extraordinary new book, Investable: When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance, A Cautionary Tale. The book examines the World Bank's novel efforts - under former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim - to mobilize private finance to support pandemic response in the world's poorest nations. While the Bank succeeded in rolling out pandemic bonds, Erikson shows that pandemic bonds did not fulfill their potential. Who did the bonds serve? What was their impact? And how did they become a new tool for pandemic response efforts in the first place? They delve into these issues and more in this enjoyable and illuminating conversation.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down to talk with Dr. Sapna Desai, a Senior Fellow at the Population Council Institute in New Delhi, India. A public health expert with over 20 years of experience working on women's health in India, she holds a PhD in epidemiology and population from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Master's in Population and International Health from Harvard University. They talk about maternal health, sterilization and population control, the problem of unnecessary hysterectomy in India, feminism, evidence and activism, and the movement to decolonize global health.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Lioba Hirsch, a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. They talk about her new book, Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake, as well as racism, decolonization, North-South power dynamics, global health governance, inequalities in relation to COVID-19, and infectious disease response in Africa.

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In this episode, I sit down with two researchers doing very exciting - but also very different - kinds of research on global health politics. In the first conversation, I talk with Dr. Katharina Krause, an international relations scholar who is a Research Associate at the University of Tubingen about her book project on the relationship between health security and images of infectious diseases like Ebola. In the second conversation, I talk with Dr. Brooke Bocast, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University about her book, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood and the New East Africa. The book won the Council on Anthropology and Education's Outstanding Book Award; the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize; and was named Honorable Mention for the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Both great conversations. 

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Adeoye "Oye" Owolewa. A pharmacist recognized for his efforts to protect public health, Dr. Owolewa has served as the Shadow Representative to Congress for the nation's capital since his election in November 2020. He shares his experience as a Nigerian American working in politics, advocating for D.C. statehood at a time when the nation's capital was under federal occupation by National Guard troops, a federalized Metropolitan Police Department, and ICE agents. He reflects on his experience working as a pharmacist at a time when Medicaid is being cut, scientific research for drug development has been slashed, tens of thousands of federal civil servants have been let go, and U.S. global health and development institutions have been decimated. And he offers his vision as a candidate for a seat on the Council of the District of Columbia, also known as the D.C. Council.  

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with New York Times best-selling author John Green to talk about his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. Best known for novels, like Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns, which have been turned into Hollywood movies, in his latest book Mr. Green turns his attention to a disease for which we have a cure, but which still kills over a million people a year, most in poor countries. They talk about what moved him to write this book, his work on the board of Partners in Health, and his advocacy for addressing global health injustices.