The Global Health Politics Podcast

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. Until last year, Dr. Daskalakis served as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In August 2025, he resigned along with a number of other longtime senior CDC officials over concerns that the CDC was moving in directions that were counter to their understanding of science and ethical values. The two discuss Dr. Daskalakis' experience responding to HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and mpox; his decision to resign from the CDC; and how public health can preserve scientific integrity, community trust, and emergency-response capacity amid politicization and institutional weakening of the CDC.

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Monica Wang, an award-winning researcher whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and National Geographic. Dr. Wang currently serves as Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health. Her new book - The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health - is a personal, story-driven account of how social and structural factors, like income, race and ethnicity, neighborhood, and social networks - shape our health and well-being. They discuss the book, her motivations for writing it, collective responsibility, and politics and misinformation.

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with William and Mary Professor Brent Kaup and Lehigh Professor Kelly Austin to discuss their new book, The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease. Their exciting and insightful new book takes readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda to illustrate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. In the process, we learn about the challenges of writing the book during COVID-19, the changing landscape of sociology, and how the authors think about research.

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At a moment when the world is grappling with an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that is spiraling out of control, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Mardia Stone. Dr. Stone served as Ebola Response Team Coordinator at the WHO and Senior Advisor to the Incident Manager of Liberia's national Ebola response. She is author of Collapse and Resiliency: The Inside Story of Liberia's Unprecedented Ebola Response. Written with Tolbert Nyenswah, Collapse and Resiliency is the only book written by an African official on the Ebola response.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with anthropologist Susan Erikson. They talk about her extraordinary new book, Investable: When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance, A Cautionary Tale. The book examines the World Bank's novel efforts - under former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim - to mobilize private finance to support pandemic response in the world's poorest nations. While the Bank succeeded in rolling out pandemic bonds, Erikson shows that pandemic bonds did not fulfill their potential. Who did the bonds serve? What was their impact? And how did they become a new tool for pandemic response efforts in the first place? They delve into these issues and more in this enjoyable and illuminating conversation.