Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Project HOPE’s CEO Rabih Torbay and Director of Emergency Response and Preparedness Tom Cotter, who joined the show from the field in Bucharest, Romania. They share the daunting task of providing extensive support and local training to the existing medical infrastructure in handling both the destruction of medical facilities within Ukraine and the millions of refugees in need of medical and behavioral health services as they arrive in neighboring countries. “These people have all experienced trauma,” Cotter said. They are training local laypersons in Psychological First Aid techniques to help the refugees transition to safety. Project HOPE is also keeping supply lines going into Ukraine with desperately needed medical supplies. “Even if this conflict ended tomorrow, the destruction will take years to rebuild,” Torbay said. They expect to be assisting in the region for a long time. And they continue to provide medical support in 30 countries around the world dealing with COVID-19, famine, and military conflict, with a particular focus on women and children’s health.

As the world faces enormous challenges, in Ukraine and from COVID, it’s doing so without one of its global health champions. Dr. Paul Farmer, the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health, unexpectedly passed away in February.

This week Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the Chief Medical Officer of Partners in Health, shares memories with Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter. She explains how the nonprofit’s focus will remain on community health in the countries it serves.

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The whole world is watching as Russian troops advance in Ukraine and brave medical professionals are on duty throughout the crisis. One of them is Dr. Kateryna Pochtar, who shares her chilling description of how she and her colleagues are trying to help patients in their clinic. Dr. Pochtar explains how patients are crying in her arms as her life consists of just work, hiding and sleep. She tells Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter that some patients are afraid to seek medical care because they worry they’ll be trapped outside during an air alarm.

Dr. Mary Bassett, New York State Commissioner of Health, says the COVID Omicron variant is still exposing health inequities — African Americans in New York have been hospitalized twice as much as the majority population during this latest wave. Bassett says achieving health equity “will be the North Star of my working life as a physician committed to public health.” Bassett also tells Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter that the state has four times as many hospitalized now compared to the pandemic lull last summer. Yet she also notes the hospitalization and case rates are going down.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Anthony Fauci back to the show, two years after his first appearance discussing the novel coronavirus spreading around the world. The Chief Medical Advisor to the Biden White House and long-time Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH expressed concern over the ongoing political divisiveness impacting our ability to contain COVID outbreaks leading to almost 1 million deaths in this country. He says FDA approval of the mRNA vaccine for young children will likely come on the heels of better data on efficacy with a third dose. He still marvels at the dramatic scientific achievement of the swift development and deployment of an effective vaccine against a challenging new pathogen, which he said would not have happened without decades of committing our resources to scientific research.

Dr. Cameron Webb, White House Senior Policy Adviser for COVID-19 Equity, is navigating a tricky situation — as he advocates for vaccines, the university where he works just dropped its student vaccine mandate. Webb tells Conversations on Health Care hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter that he realizes the University of Virginia has some new dynamics to navigate. “There’s this rush to roll back a lot of the strategies that have gotten us to a point where we’re seeing less death,” he says. “This pandemic has been politicized to a point that it’s indistinguishable from the rest of our political rhetoric…rhetoric often meant to motivate a voter base.” Webb also discusses the administration’s efforts to address COVID equity issues, including the need to collect better data about race and ethnicity vaccination rates.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, on her expectations for finding consensus on revised Build Back Better legislation. She says the expanded Child Tax Credit has lifted millions of American children out of poverty, significantly easing economic pressures on working families, and should be restored. She also discusses the President’s infrastructure law, which she says will have a dramatic impact on the nation’s aging transportation and clean water delivery systems, as well as create new jobs.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome renowned epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, who has served 5 presidential administrations in preparing for pandemics and bio-terror threats. Dr. Osterholm says the highly infectious omicron variant will continue to threaten hospital systems, schools and supply chains, warning the threat of future variants that may evade immunity is still a very real concern. He predicts that a combination of improved vaccines and new therapeutics will render COVID more manageable in the future, but that we will have to learn to ‘live with it’.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, addressing confusion and frustration around lack of rapid COVID tests and need for more N95 masks for the public. She talks about the shifting plan of action from the Biden Administration in response to the dramatic surge in omicron-driven COVID cases, and the scaled up efforts to make rapid tests and high quality masks available to all Americans.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, and co-creator of a new, low-cost vaccine for COVID-19. Dr. Hotez discusses plans for Corbevax, a recombinant protein vaccine shown to be highly protective against COVID-19, which has just been given Emergency Use Authorization by the Indian government. Dr. Hotez’s plan is to make the formula available to poor and developing countries around the world, without any expectation of payment, to accelerate the pace of global vaccinations and bring the pandemic to an end. He also offers important advice to families with children navigating the omicron surge while heading back to school.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with renowned virus expert Dr. William Haseltine who has ‘grave concerns’ about Merck’s oral COVID drug Malnupiravir, which recently won narrow approval from the FDA advisory panel. He says the drug unleashes ‘dangerous’ mutations that could evolve the virus beyond control. He’s also urging extreme caution as the highly infectious omicron variant is sweeping across the US, saying it could be as deadly as the delta variant and that boosters may offer only limited protection of 3 months. Dr Haseltine, who developed the Anthrax vaccine and is President of ACCESS Health International, says public health protocols of masking, rapid testing and social distancing should be put back in place during this next surge.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter welcome Dr. Eric Topol, Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, for his perspective on the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. He says early data shows that it is highly transmissible, but apparently not more deadly. His greater concern is around the current Delta surge leading to more infections, low vaccination rates in developing countries leading to more variants, and the “abysmal” vaccination performance in the U.S. He says mRNA vaccines should be considered a 3-dose protocol, and that rapid testing and virus sequencing should be more broadly deployed to stop the spread of the virus.

Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter examine the latest details about the omicron COVID variant, including the important role community health centers continue to play in the pandemic. In addition, we revisit their recent conversation with Planned Parenthood Federation of America President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson on the Supreme Court hearing on the Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, posing the greatest threat to Roe v. Wade in half a century. She also talks about systematic efforts in many states limiting women’s access to abortion, and examines the previous administration’s Title X abortion ‘gag’ rule, which seriously impeded access to reproductive health services, creating particular hardship for vulnerable women. She expects the conservative-leaning high court will ultimately rule to undermine Roe.

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Gary Cohen, Founder of Health Care Without Harm, an award-winning global non-profit seeking to create an environmentally-responsible health system. Winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s ‘Genius Grant’ for his work reducing the health industry’s pollution footprint, he says the COP26 UN Climate summit in Glasgow didn’t go far enough to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, which means a billion people will be exposed to dangerous heat stress. Mr. Cohen says the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill makes some progress addressing climate change, but that the President’s Build Back Better Act could have a dramatic impact. He says de-carbonizing the nation’s health industry will build healthier communities and address health inequity.

Update (11/12/2021): We are devastated to learn of the sudden passing of Glen de Vries. He was a thoughtful, brilliant guest whose innovative ideas we were lucky enough to hear firsthand on the show. Our deepest condolences to his family. He will be missed.

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Glen de Vries, Vice Chair for Health and Life Sciences at Dassault Systèmes and Founder and former CEO of Medidata, the first cloud based system supporting global clinical trials research. An astronaut aboard Jeff Bezos’ recent Blue Origin rocket flight with William Shatner of Star Trek fame, de Vries points to the scientific advances from the nation’s space program fueling the technologies that now support telehealth and precision medicine. Also author of The Patient Equation, he predicts a dramatic period of exponential growth in scientific and biologic discovery post-pandemic.