# Theory of Change: #2: Seth Berkley has seen our pandemic future

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/devex-podcasts-65118/theory-of-change-2-seth-berkley-has-seen-our-pandemic-future.md
Podcast: [Devex Podcasts](https://stenobird.com/podcast/devex-podcasts-65118)
Published: 2026-06-09T07:52:47+00:00
Episode link: https://soundcloud.com/devex-intl/seth-berkley-has-seen-our-pandemic-future
Audio file: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2335974164-devex-intl-seth-berkley-has-seen-our-pandemic-future.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/devex-podcasts-65118/episodes/theory-of-change-2-seth-berkley-has-seen-our-pandemic-future
Duration seconds: 4728

## Resource

Much of Seth Berkley's career has been an attempt to answer the question: How do you get vaccines to people who aren’t well-served by an inequitable global health system? When the COVID-19 outbreak exploded in early 2020, that question took on new urgency — along with a mind-spinning slew of political, economic, technological, and cultural complications. Berkley, then the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, had a pretty good idea what was coming. As early as February 2020 he was warning publicly that if researchers were successful in developing a COVID-19 vaccine, lower-income countries would struggle to access them. That is exactly what happened. It is also what led Berkley to help launch COVAX, the global initiative to deliver COVID-19 vaccines around the world. In the wake of the pandemic, the relationships between politics, society, and vaccines have only grown more fraught. One example: Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personally intervened to block U.S. funding to Gavi. Berkley, a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist, joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast to discuss the lessons of the COVID-19 response, the long and complicated history of humanity’s relationships with vaccines, the incredible potential of new technologies — and the deeply troubling risks that some of them pose. His new book is called “Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity.”

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