Health Equity, COVID-19, and Global Health Cooperation

Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the United States is exiting the “full-blown pandemic phase” of COVID-19. While this is welcome news, many questions remain about how countries can better handle future pandemics and other global public health crises. COVID-19 demonstrated that even pandemics aren’t always enough to bring nations together with a sense of common cause; for example, COVID-19 became a wedge issue in the relationship between the United States and China and continues to generate friction even now, as we enter the third year of the pandemic in the United States. What does the future hold for COVID-19 collaboration and global public health collaboration more generally?

Host David Firestein is joined by Dr. Jennifer Huang Bouey, Tang Chair for China Policy Studies and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, to explore these questions.

In addition to her position at RAND, Dr. Bouey also serves as the chair of the International Health Department at Georgetown University and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Bush China Foundation. She leads wide-ranging collaborative research initiatives on global health security and related topics. Currently, she is working on projects to assess health diplomacy in the post COVID-19 era and gender equity and health in Asia, among others. She is also actively involved in U.S.-China track 2 diplomacy in these and other areas.