When the world was in a health crisis, Dr. Seth Berkley didn’t just watch—he was at the centre of the storm. In this episode of the Public Health Insight Podcast, we rewind to his early days and trace his path through global health’s toughest challenges.

Pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (pandemic PPR) stands at a precipice because of inadequate financing at a time of shifting geopolitical alignment in global health. In 2021, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (HLIP) called for US$15 billion per year in international finance to strengthen surveillance, health systems, vaccine supply, and governance for health security.1 Execution, however, has not lived up to ambition. Following the recommendations of the HLIP, the G20 catalysed the creation of the Pandemic Fund at the World Bank in 2022, but the Fund has only mobilised pledges for approximately $3 billion of its envisioned annual $10 billion scale.2 The G20 Joint Finance–Health Task Force (JFHTF) was launched in 2021 to bridge finance and health policy. Despite these developments, no global mechanism adequately finances pandemic response, and breakthrough research and development are underfunded.

The idea was born over drinks at the Hard Rock Hotel in Davos Switzerland, on January 23, 2020.

There was a new virus ringing alarm bells in China, but it hadn't yet become an international concern. It didn't even have a name. Yet Seth Berkley was already thinking about how to protect the world with vaccines against it.

Berkley was the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to expanding access to vaccines around the globe.

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Canada is no longer measles-free because of ongoing outbreaks, international health experts said Monday, as childhood vaccination rates fall and the highly contagious virus spreads across North and South America.

The loss of the country’s measles elimination status comes more than a year after the highly contagious virus started spreading.

Measles cases in the U.S. and Canada continue to rise, but not as dramatically as they did. Vaccination is still the best way to protect your family and those around you who cannot be vaccinated.
(Note – we use data from both the CDC and the Brown University Pandemic Center’s weekly tracking report. While the CDC tracks confirmed cases only, the Pandemic Center tracks both probable and confirmed cases using publicly available data from state health departments. Numbers below are correct as of 11/6).

So, how many cases and outbreaks of measles are there in the US at the moment?

Seth Berkley & Eric Topol - Discuss Fair Doses Book A recording from Eric Topol's live video

It’s Election Day in parts of the country, so we thought it was time to talk politics.

Dr. Craig Spencer, from Brown University’s School of Public Health, penned a Substack last week that stopped us cold. In it, he makes a bold case that public health needs to get more political—not partisan, but political in the sense of organizing, mobilizing, and demanding what people say they value: cleaner air, safer food, prevention that actually gets funded.


It’s a striking call at a moment of profound change — what some call a reimagining, others a dismantling — of public health itself. But if you look at the polling across Republicans, Democrats, and the MAHA “curious,” there’s surprising common ground right in public health’s wheelhouse.

It’s time, Spencer argues, for public health to step into the political arena to fight for change or watch the system unravel.

Walgreens is unveiling an expanded tracker of flu and COVID-19 to monitor where they're spreading across the country this winter, the company shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: Commercial and academic tools are becoming more important for identifying respiratory virus hotspots this year as federal data becomes less available.

Driving the news: Walgreens is adding COVID-19 data to its existing flu prevalence tracker to create a more comprehensive picture of when and where respiratory viruses are spiking this winter, the company told Axios on Monday.

Florida’s announcement that it would scrap public school vaccine mandates next year hit Elizabeth particularly hard. Her 11-year-old daughter suffers from a rare immunodeficiency disorder that requires biweekly plasma infusions to provide some protection against disease.

But she can still be out of school for 50 days during the school year — and Elizabeth is worried that falling vaccine rates will make their situation far worse.

Amid massive cutbacks to health funding, Seth Berkley says that global health organizations face a “devil’s choice” around vaccines. They can focus on bringing much-needed immunizations to people now or get ready for the next pandemic. And it’s coming.

Global health expert Seth Berkley stated that future outbreaks and pandemics are inevitable, with the potential to be more severe than COVID-19. Berkley emphasized the certainty of such events due to evolutionary factors during a recent discussion on global health preparedness. He highlighted the importance of learning from the COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare for future health crises.

Measles, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise around the world, and cuts to foreign aid, coupled with growing vaccine hesitancy, and persistent gaps in vaccine access are fueling outbreaks in poor and wealthy nations alike. Global health experts discuss the drivers of these outbreaks, the solutions that can advance vaccine equity and better public health worldwide, and a new vaccine-preventable disease tracker from Think Global Health, developed in collaboration with ProMED.