Pandemics: Looking Back to Look Forward
Obenshain Family Great Issues Lecture
Pandemics: Looking Back to Look Forward
In Conversation with John Barry and Kendall Hoyt, moderated by Victoria Holt
What does the future hold? As we all eagerly look ahead to COVID receding in our rearview mirror, the time is now to start looking at the lessons learned from the pandemic. Two international experts in biosecurity and the global effects of disease take the stage to discuss the origins of COVID, analyze our preparedness, and suggest ways to prevent the next epidemic.
Join us in the conversation with John Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, and Professor Kendall Hoyt, the Dickey Center’s new Faculty Director of the Pandemic Security Project, both advisers on the national Covid Commission Planning Group. They, along with moderator and Dickey Center Director, Tori Holt, seek to answer the question “Where do we go next?”
John M. Barry is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author whose books have won multiple awards. The National Academies of Sciences named his 2004 book The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history, a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. His earlier book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for the year's best book of American history and in 2005 the New York Public Library named it one of the 50 best books in the preceding 50 years, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His books have also been embraced by experts in applicable fields: in 2006 he became the only non-scientist ever to give the National Academies Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture, a lecture which honors contributions to water-related science, and he was the only non-scientist on a federal government Infectious Disease Board of Experts. He has served on numerous boards, including ones at M.I.T's Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Society of American Historians.
Kendall Hoyt is the new Faculty Director for the Dickey Global Health Initiative's Pandemic Security Project, an 18-month endeavor to explore and analyze the lessons surfaced during the global response to the pandemic. She also serves as an Assistant Professor at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a Senior Lecturer at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College where she teaches courses on biosecurity, health systems, and technological innovation. Her research is focused on health security, innovation policy, and vaccine development. She serves on the US Covid Commission Planning Group. She has served as a consultant for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She is the author of Long Shot: Vaccines for National Defense, Harvard University Press, 2012.
Sponsored by The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. Made possible by generous support from Penny and Bill Obenshain ’62.
Recorded April 28, 2022
