Congressman Ami Bera is a Democrat from California who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is chair of the subcommittee on Asia and Pacific.
He is also a medical doctor who has long championed global health issues. Last November he served on a commission on pandemic preparedness convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC that issued a series of recommendations that today looks rather prescient.
We spoke just a day after President Trump announced that the United States was freezing funding for the World Health Organization and needless to say Congressman Bera strongly disagrees with that move. And it’s his reasoning I think that is most instructive. He does a really good job of explaining why preventing clusters of COVID-19 from taking hold in poorer countries is required for securing the US homeland, and how the WHO is critical to that effort.
We cover other ground too, including what the trajectory of the outbreak looks like here in the United States, and how that trajectory might shape US politics and foreign policy.
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