Seth Berkley has seen our pandemic future

Much of Seth Berkley's career has been an attempt to answer the question: How do you get vaccines to people who aren’t well-served by an inequitable global health system?
When the COVID-19 outbreak exploded in early 2020, that question took on new urgency — along with a mind-spinning slew of political, economic, technological, and cultural complications.

Berkley, then the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, had a pretty good idea what was coming. As early as February 2020 he was warning publicly that if researchers were successful in developing a COVID-19 vaccine, lower-income countries would struggle to access them.

That is exactly what happened. It is also what led Berkley to help launch COVAX, the global initiative to deliver COVID-19 vaccines around the world.

In the wake of the pandemic, the relationships between politics, society, and vaccines have only grown more fraught. 

One example: Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personally intervened to block U.S. funding to Gavi.

Berkley, a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist, joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast to discuss the lessons of the COVID-19 response, the long and complicated history of humanity’s relationships with vaccines, the incredible potential of new technologies — and the deeply troubling risks that some of them pose.

His new book is called “Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity.”