The Global Health Politics Podcast

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

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.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down to talk with Dr. Sapna Desai, a Senior Fellow at the Population Council Institute in New Delhi, India. A public health expert with over 20 years of experience working on women's health in India, she holds a PhD in epidemiology and population from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Master's in Population and International Health from Harvard University. They talk about maternal health, sterilization and population control, the problem of unnecessary hysterectomy in India, feminism, evidence and activism, and the movement to decolonize global health.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Lioba Hirsch, a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. They talk about her new book, Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake, as well as racism, decolonization, North-South power dynamics, global health governance, inequalities in relation to COVID-19, and infectious disease response in Africa.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, I sit down with two researchers doing very exciting - but also very different - kinds of research on global health politics. In the first conversation, I talk with Dr. Katharina Krause, an international relations scholar who is a Research Associate at the University of Tubingen about her book project on the relationship between health security and images of infectious diseases like Ebola. In the second conversation, I talk with Dr. Brooke Bocast, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University about her book, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood and the New East Africa. The book won the Council on Anthropology and Education's Outstanding Book Award; the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize; and was named Honorable Mention for the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Both great conversations.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Adeoye "Oye" Owolewa. A pharmacist recognized for his efforts to protect public health, Dr. Owolewa has served as the Shadow Representative to Congress for the nation's capital since his election in November 2020. He shares his experience as a Nigerian American working in politics, advocating for D.C. statehood at a time when the nation's capital was under federal occupation by National Guard troops, a federalized Metropolitan Police Department, and ICE agents. He reflects on his experience working as a pharmacist at a time when Medicaid is being cut, scientific research for drug development has been slashed, tens of thousands of federal civil servants have been let go, and U.S. global health and development institutions have been decimated. And he offers his vision as a candidate for a seat on the Council of the District of Columbia, also known as the D.C. Council.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with New York Times best-selling author John Green to talk about his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. Best known for novels, like Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns, which have been turned into Hollywood movies, in his latest book Mr. Green turns his attention to a disease for which we have a cure, but which still kills over a million people a year, most in poor countries. They talk about what moved him to write this book, his work on the board of Partners in Health, and his advocacy for addressing global health injustices.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with one of the most prominent voices in global health today, Dr. Madhu Pai. Dr. Pai is a medical doctor and Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology & Global Health at McGill University and the Associate Director of the McGill International TB Centre in Montreal. In this wide-ranging conversation, they talk about tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, the climate crisis, the roots of global health injustice, the recent foreign aid cuts, Global North-Global South inequalities, and moves to decolonize global health.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with American University anthropologist Thurka Sangaramoorthy to discuss her work on immigration and health. They talk about her work with Haitian immigrants in South Florida that was the subject of her first book; her work at the CDC and book on rapid ethnographic assessments; her new book - Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America on how immigrants navigate healthcare challenges in rural Maryland; the field of anthropology; and her recent experience working as Refugee Coordinator for the State Department's response in Sudan and South Sudan.

Send us Fan Mail

In this long-awaited episode, originally recorded in Fall 2022, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. James Pfeiffer, Professor of Global Health and Anthropology at University of Washington. They talk about global health work in Mozambique; World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs; debt and austerity and their impact on development; and the movement to decolonize global health.

Send us Fan Mail

In this podcast episode, Joseph Harris sits down with University of Illinois-Chicago Professor of Sociology Claire Decoteau. They discuss her latest book - Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life - which explores how and why the city of Chicago failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens in its pandemic response. In the process, they explore the changing landscape of global health and sociology and the implications for democracy and health.

Send us Fan Mail

Many health systems around the world rely on community health workers (CHWs) who play vital roles in health promotion, disease prevention, and primary care. While CHWs in some countries are not paid or receive only small stipends and operate without a great deal of support, guidance, or professional standards, one global movement is trying to change that. In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Lennie Bazira - a medical doctor and Policy Director for the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC) - and Jannet Otieno - a community health worker in Kenya. CHIC's membership includes thousands of CHWs and dozens of health organizations in 60+ countries who are working to make professional CHWs the norm worldwide by changing guidelines, funding, and policy. They discuss the important work community health workers do and the challenges involved in making change.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with University of Chicago sociologist Jenny Trinitapoli. They discuss her new book, An Epidemic of Uncertainty, which explores how young adults negotiate relationships, sex, and childbearing in the context of the AIDS epidemic in Malawi, one of the world's hardest hit nations. Her landmark book draws attention not only to the uncertainty young people face in relation to their HIV status (nearly 60% of the women studied reported that they did not know if they would be infected with HIV in the next two years), but the profound uncertainty they experience in their everyday lives, having to navigate challenges that include food shortages, adequate shelter, and lightning strikes.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with University of Pennsylvania physician and sociologist Victor Roy. They discuss the issues that are at the core of Dr. Roy's new book, Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines, which is available for free online through open access. The discussion covers the financialization of healthcare and medicine and the impact that finance has had on drug pricing and access, including for Hepatitis C treatment, which has a $90,000 price tag but costs just $100 to manufacture. An important thread explores the need to follow the money in global health research and the Health and Political Economy Project, which Dr. Roy directs.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with University of Pennsylvania political scientist Julia Lynch to discuss her work on politics, pandemics, public health, inequality, and social policy. Our wide-ranging conversation explores the role of political science in understanding the political economy of health and two of her recent books - Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth and The Unequal Pandemic: COVID-19 and Health Inequalities.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris explores the actions taken by the Trump administration to dismantle U.S. foreign aid and the consequences that these actions will have for global health. He sits down with Dr. Beth Cameron, a former Senior Adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); Nidhi Bouri, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID; Dr. Brooke Nichols, Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University and creator of as U.S. aid freeze impact tracker; and Sheena Adams, Global Communications Director for The Accountability Lab, which launched its own Global Aid Freeze Tracker.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with Brown University political scientist Prerna Singh to discuss her latest book project, Moral Vaccination: How Ideas and Institutions Controlled Contagion in China and India. Our wide-ranging conversation explores how states generate compliance with public health interventions, grounded in a comparison of India and China's efforts to eradicate smallpox. Her important work suggests the need to incorporate a broader understanding of human motivations that goes beyond economic rationality, drawing on insights from a range of academic disciplines. Dr. Singh is past President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.