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.

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.

BERKLEY’S TELL-ALL — Seth Berkley, the man who led a global vaccination push during the Covid-19 pandemic, has written a book describing his experience and, in his view, who helped the effort and who hampered it, POLITICO’s Carmen Paun reports.

During the pandemic, Berkley, as the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, led COVAX, a partnership with the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and UNICEF, to buy and distribute Covid vaccines. The U.S. was a major funder of the effort.
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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.

For those working in global health, and especially on immunisation, it is difficult not to feel despair at the headwinds in 2025 that have been blowing forcefully against decades of collective efforts to improve the world's health through prevention of infectious diseases, especially for those in greatest need. Cuts to official development assistance in Europe and USAID in the USA, and reduced funding for WHO and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, among other organisations, threaten populations today, with the impacts expected to be felt for a generation. Furthermore, the undermining of independent evidence-based scientific advice, and of confidence in science itself, risks taking us back to a pre-enlightenment world of magical thinking, where decisions about health were based on untested and unchallenged belief rather than the meticulous experimentation and careful observation we expect today.

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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.

Fair Doses is a story of vaccines: how they came about, why they are important, and how they have been made globally available—although our quest for vaccine equity is still ongoing. In this fascinating deep dive into vaccines, Dr. Seth Berkley, an internationally recognized infectious disease epidemiologist and public health leader, offers an inside view of the challenges of developing and disseminating vaccines for a broad swath of illnesses, from Ebola to AIDS to malaria and beyond.

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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.

Gavin is joined by Dr. Seth Berkley, former CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to discuss his new book, Fair Doses.

Dr. Berkley reflects on the global impact of vaccines, the ongoing challenges to vaccine equity, and the lessons learned from leading initiatives such as COVAX during the COVID-19 pandemic.

(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.

Fair Doses Seth Berkley University of California Press, 2025. 408 pp.

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.

Among its many painful lessons, the COVID-19 pandemic taught us that America’s defenses against a devastating health crisis were far weaker than most had reason to expect. More than 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to COVID, the most of any country. It’s puzzling and frightening to watch the Trump Administration dismantle initiatives aimed at keeping us safe from another pandemic.

And let’s not kid ourselves; another pandemic is evolutionarily inevitable. We can’t say when it will strike or if it will be worse than COVID. (Deadly as it was, COVID proved to be far less fatal than others we’ve seen recently, like Ebola, Marburg, MERS and SARS.) But research has projected that there is about a 50 percent chance another COVID-like magnitude of a pandemic (>25 million global deaths) will hit us in the next 20 to 25 years.

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Earlier this week, President Donald Trump indicated that using acetaminophen, commonly known by its brand name Tylenol, shouldn’t be used during a pregnancy and could contribute to rising autism rates in the United States.

The claim has since been scrutinized by health officials, while also shedding light on how clinical data about pregnant women is gathered.
Alyssa Bilinski, a researcher at Brown University, joined 12 News at 4 on Wednesday to discuss Trump’s claim and the risks of medication in pregnant women.

The Pandemic Agreement, adopted by the World Health Assembly in May, is a historic step toward strengthening global systems to prevent, detect, and respond to epidemic and pandemic threats. Yet many low- and middle-income countries face significant political and technical challenges in ratifying and implementing the agreement.

No country is fully prepared for a future pandemic or epidemic. National implementation of the Pandemic Agreement will require sustained political will, policy reforms, investments in capacity building, and ongoing transparency, monitoring, and accountability.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) - Children in Florida are required to get several vaccines before they begin school. It’s a requirement supported by Dr. Scott Rivkees.

“Schools should be places where children should be able to go to without having to worry about getting vaccine preventable diseases,” he told TV20.

He was the state’s former surgeon general during Gov. Ron DeSantis’ first term and helped lead the state during the start of COVID-19.

Rivkees is now a professor at Brown University, but is sounding off on the state’s plan to eliminate vaccines mandates for children. It’s a decision made earlier this month by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the man who replaced Rivkees who left his post in 2021.

On Monday, President Trump, flanked by the heads of the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, drew a clear link between autism and pregnant women’s use of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. He urged women to avoid the drug while pregnant unless “absolutely necessary,” claiming, “There’s no downside in not taking it.”

The White House pointed to a recent systematic review of 46 studies, in which authors urged caution in using the medication, recommending only “judicious acetaminophen use” following “medical consultation.” At the same time, many experts are stating the opposite. For example, a statement from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists emphasized that pregnant patients “should not be frightened away from the many benefits of acetaminophen.”

Before he set foot in 200 Independence Avenue, Washington DC, Robert F Kennedy Jr, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, had raised more than a few eyebrows from America’s medical establishment. Around 17,000, to be precise – that’s how many doctors signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.

Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. On Monday, speaking from the White House, Trump and the US secretary of health and human services said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” It was announced that the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but neither Trump or Kennedy Jr provided any peer reviewed medical evidence to support this. They also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism.

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President Trump tied the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy to autism and made several other claims about vaccines. William Brangham discussed those claims and the concerns about what the president said with Alycia Halladay of the Autism Science Foundation and Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

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The committee that offers vaccine advice to the nation’s top public health agency voted Friday against recommending the updated COVID-19 vaccine to people aged 6 months or older, instead leaving the decision to individuals. The panel also decided against recommending that states and local authorities require a prescription for COVID-19 vaccines.

On many levels, people watching the two-day proceedings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) did not know what to expect. Much of the week was uncharted, and a planned vote on the hepatitis B vaccine was tabled despite being on the agenda.

(TNND) — The panel that develops vaccine recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed one change to childhood immunizations but tabled a vote for another before turning their attention to the hotly debated COVID-19 vaccines.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices continued its two-day meeting Friday after voting Thursday to recommend a standalone chickenpox vaccination in toddlers to reduce their risk of febrile seizures.

A combination MMRV vaccine is available, which includes measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) immunizations.

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In April 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential bid in Boston, promising to “Make America Healthy Again.” Since becoming President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made a mockery of this promise, undermining decades of public health consensus.

His tenure recently reached its lowest point, with the explosive departure of Director Susan Monarez from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four other officials left the CDC over Kennedy’s leadership, with one accusing him of “weaponization of public health.”

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The Trump administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo doesn’t appear to be following the playbook used in previous outbreaks, and it’s sounding alarm bells among biosecurity experts.

Current and former leaders of the U.S.’s infectious disease response apparatus are warning that they’re not seeing the level of coordination between federal agencies that’s needed to successfully respond to such outbreaks abroad.

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The world’s market for vaccines, as it exists today, depends on the United States. The U.S. has poured immense resources into the design and development of vaccines, and has paid far higher prices for doses than most other nations can afford. The federal government has issued broad vaccine recommendations, generating strong, consistent demand. “That’s a predictable market,” Richard Hughes IV, a public-health-law expert and the former vice president of public policy at Moderna, told me. It’s also a huge one. Seth Berkley, the former CEO of Gavi, which supports the immunization of about half the world’s children, told me that the U.S. accounts for 35 to 40 percent of global vaccine revenue at a minimum, more than all of Europe combined.

Americans across the political spectrum are aligned on at least one belief, albeit for different reasons: The CDC is a mess. In a poll conducted this summer by The Washington Post and KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed low confidence that the agency could be trusted to make independent decisions based on scientific fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the head of Health and Human Services, has described the CDC as dysfunctional and politicized; according to the former CDC director Susan Monarez, he has also disparaged the agency’s workers as child murderers. Meanwhile, public-health experts—a group that has historically worked in tandem with the CDC—now question the agency’s credibility with Kennedy in charge. “You can’t trust anything that comes out of the CDC,” Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told me.

David Baltimore explained to Mr Mandela, in a language so precise as only he could, that there was no vaccine for Aids and that an aggressive rollout of antiretrovirals, tough management of needlestick use and a high visibility public campaign for safe sex were key.

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On Sunday, after four days of silence about how Ladapo’s all-encompassing goal would be achieved, the health department issued a statement saying it was proposing a rule change “to remove requirements for childhood immunizations … not required for school entry” such as hepatitis B, varicella (chickenpox), and influenza.

Vaccine requirements for polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus, it said, “remain in place, unless updated through legislation”, and “all vaccines will remain available to families throughout Florida”.

Scott Rivkees, an infectious diseases expert at Brown University and former Florida surgeon general under DeSantis, told the Guardian it appeared Ladapo was in retreat.