The sixth of the Dean’s Seminars on Chronic Disease, “Politics, Policies, Law and Chronic Disease: Opportunities for Contributions from Public Health,” featured two outstanding speakers: Derek Yach, MBChB, MPH, a leading analyst of international healthcare policy who has joined in defining grand challenges of chronic non-communicable diseases and avenues to reducing chronic disease prevalence through public and private sector efforts; and Michael S. Sparer, PhD, JD, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management here at the Mailman School of Public Health and a trenchant commentator on Medicaid politics and policy, including reform efforts, intergovernmental partnerships, and the politics of incrementalism, among many others.

The seminar examined the natural history of good ideas in public health—the way that new formulations of opportunities in chronic disease prevention must traverse complex and vulnerable pathways from newly perceived opportunities to formulation and application of health policy; and through the political process and into law, often in significantly altered form. A key challenge for public health, particularly for academic public health, lies in informing the process and protecting the influence of facts, as well as dispassionate reasoning.
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February 19, 2020
The Forum, sponsored by Latham & Watkins

As the coronavirus threat continues to grow, China, the United States, and the rest of the world are grappling with the global health, economic, and political stakes of the WHO-declared public health emergency. At this Forum, a diverse panel of experts assessed unfolding efforts to contain coronavirus and discussed the legal and policy issues faced by individual countries and the international community in dealing with the threat posed by epidemics and pandemics.

Co-hosted by the Reiss Center on Law and Security.

Moderator:
• Lisa Monaco, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Reiss Center on Law and Security and Adjunct Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; former Homeland Security Advisor to President Obama

Panelists:
• Laurie Garrett, Former Senior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations; Science writer and Pulitzer Prize winner for coverage of Ebola outbreak in Zaire
• Alexandra Phelan, Member, Center for Global Health Science and Security and Faculty Research Instructor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Georgetown University; Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
• Shitong Qiao, Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law, NYU School of Law (Spring 2020)
• Howard Zucker, Commissioner of Health, New York State; former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health and former Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization
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