Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power.
With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.
For just a few dollars a dose, vaccines save lives and help reduce poverty. Unlike medical treatment, they provide a lifetime of protection from deadly and debilitating disease. They are safe and effective. They cut healthcare and treatment costs, reduce the number of hospital visits, and ensure healthier children, families and communities.
Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.
If you want to know the value of vaccines, just spend some time in a clinic in Africa. The faces of the mothers and fathers say it all: vaccines prevent illness and save lives.
The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.
Vaccines are extremely cost-effective, giving kids a healthy start in life and supporting the economic and educational foundations of entire communities. They directly lead to a healthy workforce, which is so critical to long-term development and prosperity in all countries.
The return on investment in global health is tremendous, and the biggest bang for the buck comes from vaccines. Vaccines are among the most successful and cost-effective health investments in history.
No country in the post-colonial era has thrived without first building its capacity to conduct scientific research.
By recognizing that infectious disease is not some faraway exotic issue but a global problem, and by sharing the responsibility for its prevention, diagnosis, and control, the whole world will be a lot safer.
Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power. And I try to model that in all of my interactions.
As more and more people adopt an urban lifestyle and cities continue to swell, not only does the risk of urban epidemics increase - something we haven't seen much of for decades - but the need for larger emergency stockpiles can increase, too.
Historically, industrial revolutions haven't been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.
Children who are healthy - and have adequate nutrition - are much more likely to attend school. People who finish school and do well have higher earning potential in their adult lives.
We've actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.
In large part, thanks to widespread immunization, the number of young children dying each year has declined significantly, from approximately 14 million in 1979 to slightly less than eight million in 2010.
I love science, and I believe in it. I have a faith that science can solve problems and make the world a better place.
As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.
Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.
Science is one of the comparative advantages of our knowledge-based economy, and focusing on our prowess in providing better tools to address diseases of poverty is one of the best forms of foreign aid.
