The United States government is creating a new agency to focus on global health and pandemic prevention. The Bureau of Global Health, Security and Diplomacy, housed within the Department of State, is designed to coordinate U.S. diplomacy, foreign assistance and national security policy with an eye toward better disease preparedness at home and abroad.
To lead the new agency, the administration tapped Ambassador At Large John Nkengasong, a virologist and public health professional who also serves as the global AIDS coordinator for the Biden administration. NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer talked with him about the bureau’s mission. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This new bureau has a very broad mandate. The focus is infectious diseases. The goal is to prevent them, to detect them, to control them, to respond to them. That is a big job. What is your top strategic priority for this new bureau?
The importance of this is the ability to coordinate, cooperate, collaborate and communicate, which is central to ensuring an effective global security response. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us three key lessons. We are collectively more connected than we thought. We are more vulnerable than we thought. And we have inequities that exist so vast that it requires such a builder to ensure an effective coordination and enhance the efficiency of our response to any disease threat.
The COVID outbreak really seemed to teach us that the world — and the United States — were not ready for a big pandemic. And I’m wondering what you think we need to do differently? What do we need to do better?
We need to be more intentional and really consider global health security as national security. COVID taught us that in the world, trillions of dollars were lost because of the COVID-19 pandemic [and] millions of lives — 20 million people died in three years. And the disruption that it created in supply chain management was just incredible. So we have to really step back and see…
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