Pandemic Center

Seth Berkley, M.D.

Senior Adviser to the Pandemic Center, Adjunct Professor of the Practice in the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health
pandemic_center@brown.edu
Twitter

Biography

A serial entrepreneur and pioneer in global public health for more than 35 years, Dr. Berkley has been a champion of equitable access to vaccines and of innovation, and a driving force to improve the way the world prevents and responds to infectious disease. From 2011 to 2023 Berkley served as CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. During his tenure at Gavi, Berkley led a team that worked toward broadening global immunization access, resulting in more than half of the world’s children being vaccinated annually. His leadership was equally significant in co-founding and spearheading COVAX, an initiative that facilitated the distribution of over 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to 146 nations.

As a senior advisor to the Pandemic Center, Dr. Berkley joins an interdisciplinary team that takes a holistic approach to pandemic preparedness. His global health leadership experience will bolster the Center’s efforts to build resilience to biological threats around the world and help mitigate their impact.

Recent News

TIME

Another Pandemic Is Inevitable. Trump Is Making It More Dangerous.

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.
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Freakonomics Radio Network

The World’s Most Effective Public Health Intervention Is Under Attack

Vaccines have been making a lot of headlines over the last five years. First, because of the remarkable speed with which the Covid vaccine was developed, and more recently, because of the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines. I can’t think of a better time to have a conversation with today’s guest, Seth Berkley, who for more than a decade ran the largest vaccination program in the world.
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Science Magazine

Unraveling the arc of vaccine progress

Arguably, one of humanity’s most dramatic successes has been the application of science to understand and then decisively intervene to improve these harrowing conditions. The global infant mortality rate is now less than 25 per 1000, with the US at 5.2 per 1000. Although clean water, sanitation, improved nutrition, and advances in neonatal and perinatal care have all played crucial roles in this progress, the greatest single contributor has been the development and widespread use of vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO) Expanded Programme on Immunization is estimated to account for a 40% reduction in global infant mortality rate over the last 50 years, not including the dramatic effects of smallpox eradication.

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NPR

How children will be impacted by U.S. cuts to global vaccine alliance

Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. says the U.S. will stop funding GAVI due to safety concerns. GAVI is a public-private partnership that vaccinates children in some of the poorest countries. The group has pushed back on the criticism.

Here & Now’s Asma Khalid learns more about the implications with Seth Berkley, the former CEO of GAVI, who is now a senior advisor to the Brown University School of Public Health Pandemic Center.
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Politico

States ease up on vaccine rules

LOOSENING UP — The continued spread of measles throughout the country isn’t stopping some states from trying to make it easier for parents to skirt school vaccine requirements for their children, POLITICO’s Lauren Gardner reports.

Idaho and West Virginia lawmakers recently loosened rules on vaccine mandates, while lawmakers from Florida, Louisiana and Texas are weighing measures that would make it more difficult for health providers to deny care — from organ transplants to pediatric well visits — to people who aren’t vaccinated.

Why it matters: The state efforts, among others that would crack down on the use of certain vaccines, come amid longtime vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascent to power in Washington as HHS secretary.

Texas, which has been the cradle of domestic vaccine resistance for the past decade, is now the epicenter of an exploding measles outbreak.

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Times of India

Trump’s funding cuts will deprive 75 million kids of vaccines, lead to a less safe world: Dr Seth Berkley

Professor at Brown Univeristy School of Public Health and former CEO of GAVI, the vaccine alliance, Dr Seth Berkley championed equitable access to vaccines and co-founded Covax during the pandemic. In an interview with Sunday Times he watns of the repercussions of abrupt fund cuts
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