Wilmot James to Co-Moderate Symposium on Vaccines and Global Health
COVID-19 Vaccine Development, Strategy and Implementation | A Virtual Global Health Symposium: February 22-26, 2021
Melinda Gates, Tedros Gebreyesus, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, Moncef Slaoui, and Ezekiel Emanuel to Give Keynotes
Wilmot James, ISERP Senior Research Scholar, was interviewed for the Columbia School of Professional Studies, where he is a Bioethics Lecturer, about the upcoming symposium.
“I’m not a medical scientist or public health specialist,” proclaims Dr. Wilmot James. But with a Ph.D. in Sociology and African History, Dr. James says convening experts across disciplines and national borders to focus on compelling issues is at the heart of his work.
“In order to deal with pandemics it is particularly important to build bridges across divides – intellectual, geographical, cultural and political – and engender global cooperation,” he says. That is what led him to be the co-convener of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s very first COVID-19 Vaccine Development, Strategy, and Implementation virtual symposium, February 22-26, 2021, featuring an extraordinary list of distinguished speakers from across the globe. As a former Member of Parliament and opposition spokesman on health in South Africa, Dr. James specializes in global health security policy formulation and practice. He has lectured for Columbia University’s Bioethics M.S. program for many years, serves as a Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), and has authored and edited 17 books, including Nelson Mandela’s presidential speeches titled In His Own Words (Little Brown and Co, 2003). He recently spoke about the greatest challenges that lie ahead in the global effort to curtail the current and future pandemics.