Challenges in COVID Vaccine Allocation & Distribution

Helene D. Gayle has been president and CEO of The Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, since October 2017. An expert on global development, humanitarian and health issues, Dr. Gayle spent 20 years with the Centers for Disease Control, working primarily on HIV/AIDS. She worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, directing programs on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues. She also launched the McKinsey Social Initiative (now McKinsey.org), a nonprofit that builds partnerships for social impact. Dr. Gayle co-chaired the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine working group that produced the Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus.

Helen Branswell is STAT’s infectious diseases and global health reporter. She came to STAT in 2015 with 15 years of experience covering health, with a focus on infectious diseases. Ms. Branswell was introduced to epidemic reporting during Toronto’s SARS outbreak in 2003; in the years since she has written about bird flu, the H1N1 flu pandemic, Ebola, Zika, and now leads STAT’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. She spent the summer of 2004 embedded at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a CDC Knight Fellow. In 2010-11 she was a Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where she focused on polio eradication.

Kristen Ehresmann is an epidemiologist and director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention and Control Division at the Minnesota Department of Health. Ms. Ehresmann has led numerous outbreak investigations, published in peer review journals, and been an invited speaker at national meetings. She currently oversees the epidemiologic response for COVID-19.