Health

The COVID-19 pandemic and chronic U.S. drug shortages highlight the health security and strategic importance of U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology capabilities during and between pathogenic crises. Geopolitical competition and interest in industrial policy for biotechnology further underscore the national security role of domestic biopharmaceutical infrastructure. Policymakers confront competing health, economic, and strategic priorities in maximizing innovation in technology, business models, and health-care systems in facilitating safe, accessible, secure, and sustainable products, services, and supply chains.   Please join our speakers, Monique K. Mansoura, executive director for global health security and biotechnology at The MITRE Corporation, and Victor Suarez, Colonel (ret.), U.S. Army, senior fellow (visiting) at The Council on Strategic Risks and founder of BluZoneBio, to explore challenges facing the U.S. pharma and biotech industries and approaches to strengthening the national security resilience of those industries in a world marked by health and geopolitical threats.

In response to COVID-19, member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) have been negotiating to create a pandemic agreement and to amend the existing International Health Regulations (IHR). The negotiations have been closely watched as indicators of global health diplomacy's future in an increasingly divided world. On June 1, the WHO's World Health Assembly approved amendments to the IHR and extended negotiations on a pandemic agreement. Dr. Suerie Moon, codirector of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva; David Fidler, senior fellow for global health and cybersecurity at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); and presider Thomas J. Bollyky, Bloomberg Chair in Global Health at CFR discuss what the World Health Assembly's decisions on the IHR amendments and the pandemic agreement negotiations mean for global health security, equity, and governance.