Alexis Genevieve
Jeremy Konyndyk
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Jeremy Konyndyk is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. His research focuses on humanitarian response, USAID policy reform, and global outbreak preparedness. He as well worked for the Obama administration.
In a 2017 Politico article, Konyndyk said “A major new global health crisis is a question of when, not if. Every president dating back at least to Ronald Reagan has dealt with major and unexpected outbreaks—HIV/AIDS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Zika. In recent years the world has been fortunate that these outbreaks have been either highly contagious (the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic infected up to 200 million people), or highly fatal (the H5N1 “bird flu” strain had a fatality rate of up to 60 percent)—but not both at once. At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge—like the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which infected one third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people.”