On this episode of "Halteres Presents", hosts Mickey Urdea and Rich Thayer are sitting down with Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, the Director of the Pandemic Center and Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, to comb through the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess America's readiness for pathogens both natural and from a bioterrorism weapon. This at times sobering conversation covering surveillance methods to curtail disease outbreaks, how to combat health-related misinformation, and improving American prosperity through global health security initiatives can hopefully kickstart the precautions necessary to prevent the worst case scenarios. Please enjoy this episode of "Halteres Presents".

Africa is home to the youngest population on Earth. By 2060, nearly 800 million children will live on the continent – an extraordinary demographic force that should be our greatest asset. But a landmark new study published this month in PLOS Global Public Health delivers a stark reality check: the children’s hospitals responsible for caring for this generation are stretched, strained and in many places simply not equipped to meet their needs.

---

Leveraging Data for High-Impact Health Security Investment 1
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant slowdown in economic growth across Africa and triggered widespread debt distress, leaving many countries struggling to recover. Growth is expected to remain sluggish for several years, contributing to significant reductions in health spending. Official development assistance (ODA) has dropped 70 percent since 2021, even as disease outbreaks have surged by more than 40 percent between 2022 and 2024. These trends place overwhelming strain on health systems across the continent.

The combination of economic slowdown and reductions in ODA is unfolding in a time of increasing​​ biological threats. Climate change disproportionately impacts African countries, driving a surge in infectious disease outbreaks across the continent. At the same time, rapid technological advances are lowering barriers to the misuse of biology. Yet many countries in the region lack the necessary data and core capacities to keep their populations and economies safe from emerging health crises.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

It’s easy to feel like the United States is losing ground in public health. Policies and actions from federal health leaders have fractured trust, undermined science, and disrupted essential services. This past year brought funding cuts to core health programs, the spread of dubious science, and the use of food benefits and health care as bargaining chips in political negotiations. The country urgently needs a course correction before the story of public health in America becomes one of steady decline.

The four governments of the United Kingdom responded during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they did “too little, too late,” to effectively stop the virus from spreading during a critical moment in time, according to a national inquiry published this week.

“This lack of urgency and the huge rise in infections made a mandatory lockdown inevitable,” the inquiry report explained. “It should have been introduced one week earlier. Modelling shows that in England alone there would have been approximately 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave up until 1 July 2020.”

---

The best books of 2025

Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity. By Seth Berkley. University of California Press; 408 pages; $29.95 and £25

The story of vaccines, as told by an infectious disease epidemiologist. During the covid-19 pandemic, Seth Berkley fought against political resistance and nationalism to help distribute 2bn vaccines across the world.

(TNND) — Most Americans are confident that childhood vaccines are safe and effective.

But new polling shows many Americans are skeptical of the shots. And there are gaps in sentiment along demographic and political lines.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted last month and published Tuesday found 63% of Americans have high confidence in the effectiveness of childhood vaccines.

---

Last week, the two top officials at the National Institutes of Health—the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research—debuted a new plan to help Americans weather the next pandemic: getting everyone to eat better and exercise.

---

Environmentalism has typically focused on outdoor air quality, but climate change is pushing more people indoors more of the time, even as airborne pathogens and wildfire smoke challenge indoor air quality. I discuss the fight for better indoor air with Dr. Georgia Lagoudas, who recently coordinated a global pledge declaring it a basic human right. We dig into what pollutes indoor air, the technologies that can keep it clean, and the enormous social and economic benefits clean air in schools.

---

Meet the heroes keeping global progress alive

On a Friday morning in October, about 100 high school and college students gathered in a Utah ballroom to play a game. Some students were assigned specific roles and given costumes to wear. “Government officials” slung ties over their T-shirts; “store clerks” sported aprons; and a trio of “journalists” wore fedoras and carried fake microphones.

---

The United States may be heading into its second severe flu season in a row, driven by a mutated strain called subclade K that’s behind early surges in the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

Last winter’s season was extreme, too. The US had its highest rates of flu hospitalizations in nearly 15 years. At least 280 children died of influenza, the highest number since pediatric death numbers were required to be shared in 2004.

---

A physician–scientist involved in the equitable-access initiative examines its achievements and discusses what can be done better when the world faces the next pandemic.

---

A resident of Washington state has contracted a new form of bird flu — the first case of its kind.

The source of infection remains unknown, setting this case apart from most other infections linked to farmworkers or diseased animals.

Virologists warn each human infection gives the virus a chance to mutate, potentially becoming more transmissible between people.

---

After a summer hiatus, bird flu cases are once again ticking up in the United States. During the government shutdown, public health tracking systems stopped sharing updates, including CDC’s FluView and the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), both of which provide early warning of outbreaks.

We have been flying blind in the face of a potentially catastrophic pandemic threat.

---

Local production is a global priority for increasing access to routine, outbreak, and pandemic vaccines and leads to a variety of direct and indirect benefits for countries. This study aimed to characterize the enabling environment for the sustainable production of influenza vaccines, including for epidemic and pandemic preparedness.

---

As I stepped into line to pick up my badge for the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) conference last weekend in Austin, Texas, a gregarious man approached holding two tall plastic tubes he said contained “clots” from Covid vaccinated bodies. After 36 years in the Air Force, he told me, he’d been pushed out for refusing the shot. Now in retirement, he calls funeral homes and surveys undertakers to document alleged vaccine harms.

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.

---

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.

A sit down conversation with two of the most influential actors in the indoor air quality sector, Georgia Lagoudas (Science Policy Expert and Bioengineer) and Bronwyn King (Australian Radiation Oncologist & Anti-Tobacco Campaigner), the principals behind the recent landmark air quality event at the UN General Assembly in New York.

This event launched the Global Pledge for Healthy Indoor Air—the first international effort to formally recognise clean indoor air as a basic human right essential to health and well-being.

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.

(Airdate 10/29/2025) In this episode, Jess and Sarah welcome Dr. Seth Berkley, a leading public health expert, to examine pressing global health security challenges. The scientists explore the concerning resurgence of preventable diseases and the critical role of vaccination programs in protecting populations. Dr. Berkley shares insights on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing persistent issues of vaccine inequity and hesitancy across different communities. The conversation tackles the troubling rise of anti-science legislation and the erosion of public trust in scientific institutions, while also examining the tensions between individual health freedom and collective public health responsibility. Throughout the episode, the experts offer both sobering assessments of current challenges and hopeful perspectives on future advancements in global health and scientific progress.

Seth Berkley, MD, an infectious disease epidemiologist currently advising vaccine, biotechnology, and technology companies; an adjunct professor and senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at Brown University; former CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; cofounded COVAX; founded and served as CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; and the author of Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity (University of California Press, 2025), talks about the need for vaccine equity and lessons learned (and ignored) from the COVID pandemic.

At the World Health Summit in Berlin earlier this month, I was pleased to hear discussions highlighting the crucial role of health initiatives in overall global security.

This is hardly a new topic, but it’s increasingly relevant. The risks from natural, accidental, and deliberate spread of infectious agents are escalating and with advances in synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, outbreaks have the potential to be far more lethal. Strong, well-functioning health systems that improve people’s health and help prevent outbreaks of emerging new infectious diseases are as vital to global security as advanced weaponry, military strategy, and intelligence.

Months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, efforts were already underway to ensure low-income countries would get access to future vaccines against the infection. The book "Fair Doses" tells that story and discusses the ongoing fight for vaccine equity around the world.

The former head of the international vaccine access organisation Gavi tells The BMJ about the politicising of vaccination, chaos at the CDC, and the impact on global vaccine equity

Epidemiologist Dr. Seth Berkley spoke to Live Science about the importance of vaccine equity and the obstacles undermining it, as well as the political challenges to vaccines being raised in the U.S.

AI experts, Nobel Laureates, Fortune 500 CEOs, NGO leaders and leading academic gathered in Mexico to discuss how to intervene in a system to keep superintelligence safe without sacrificing the core values of a free and open society.

During the past few months, President Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have made sweeping, thinly evidenced claims that Tylenol (acetaminophen) in pregnancy is linked to autism and that SSRIs (antidepressants) might be linked to fetal damage. In the case of Tylenol, the few research studies that claim to find a link either don’t control for confounding variables or find that the link disappears when they do; the drug has also been safely prescribed to children for decades. And scientists actually have studied SSRIs in pregnancy fairly extensively. But while these two types of drugs have been widely studied, that’s more the exception than the norm. In fact, most clinical trials and drug studies explicitly exclude people who are pregnant.

Multilateral initiatives are needed to signal confidence and fill funding gaps in mRNA research, writes Jennifer B Nuzzo

In this episode Ben Plumley catches up with Dr. Seth Berkley, founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, former CEO of GAVI and amongst other responsibilities, now a senior advisor at Brown University's School of Public Health's Pandemic Center. Seth has recently published a new book “Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity” and he and Ben discuss the book’s topics of vaccine equity, misinformation, and the rapid innovations in vaccine development, particularly the success and future potential of mRNA vaccines. Dr. Berkley highlights the challenges posed by misinformation and the political landscape, as well as the importance of global collaboration in addressing pandemics. They also explore his defining role in Covax's efforts to distribute COVID vaccines, the need for local manufacturing, and the impacts of nationalistic policies on global health. Dr. Berkley stresses the critical role of ongoing innovation and funding in preparing for future health crises and ensuring equitable access to health technologies. And he pulls no punches on the current US administration’s failures in supporting global health research and partnerships.

Avian flu flared up in Minnesota poultry operations last month after a nearly eight-month reprieve, forcing farmers to depopulate eight turkey barns.

A vaccine exists for this highly pathogenic avian influenza, which could be used against the nearly four-year outbreak that has wiped out 9.2 million birds in Minnesota alone.

Vietnam is among the countries most affected by extreme weather, which fuels the spread of infectious diseases. Prolonged heat and humidity create ideal conditions for mosquitoes to breed, driving dengue and other vector-borne illnesses. Flooding, meanwhile, increases exposure to waterborne and digestive diseases. Together, these climate-sensitive risks underline the urgent need for early warning and response systems to protect public health.

As a number of federal policies impact availability of COVID-19 vaccines, Rhode Island is looking to preserve access through protective measures. The moves followed a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration green-light of three new COVID-19 vaccines.

But in approving these vaccines, the FDA also restricted their use to people who are 65 years or older or have underlying health conditions. Those who are not eligible to receive the vaccine can get a prescription from a health care professional, but they must pay out of pocket prices.

Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced that The Sunshine State will become the first in the nation to remove the mandatory vaccination mandate for schoolchildren. That means that by the end of 2025, kids entering public school will no longer be required to have vaccinations for contagious diseases such as Chicken Pox, Hepatitis B among others. While Dr. Ladapo says the decision will ultimately give power back to individuals are parents to decide what they put in their children’s bodies, other medial professional disagree with the decision and say a health crisis could be looming. Former Florida Surgeon General and Professor of Education at Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Scott Rivkees, sat with us to talk about the ramifications that could come, not just with kids, but with public health as well.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.

Welcome to “the last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and favorite gas station food.

General Mills will be without a chief marketing officer for a time, as Doug Martin has taken the same position at a different food-ish company.

Martin is now heading up the marketing department at Wawa, a gas station chain that is pretty much the Kwik Trip of the East Coast, with a similar cult-like following thanks to its counter-serve food.