U.S.
What changes to the Obama administration's Global Health Initiative mean
- On the afternoon before the July 4th holiday, the Obama administration announced several changes to its global health strategy, including the close of the Global Health Initiative office.
- John Donnelly reported on the announcement on GlobalPost's Global Pulse blog.Here's an excerpt:
The reason [for the GHI office close]? The official line – from GHI Executive Director Lois Quam in an interview with GlobalPost – is that the office’s work will be “elevated” into the State Department’s Office of Global Diplomacy and that GHI’s principles of building health systems to treat patients instead of diseases are now firmly embedded in developing countries. Some 42 GHI country teams have been established.“By shifting from what was too often an internal focus to a strong external focus, we feel this diplomacy focus is important in order to bring more resources to achieve GHI targets,” Quam said. “Diplomacy allows us to work with partner countries and donor countries in a stronger way. I’m very pleased about this.”
But global health observers outside the government say that GHI ran into problems from the start and never fully found its place inside the Obama administration, which has put much less high-level attention on global health than its predecessor, the Bush administration.
This morning, Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations took to Twitter to offer some analysis on the change document:
Curious what others would add, I asked for additional thoughts and reactions. Here's what I got:
- In response to a question I tweeted about what role Lois Quam, the executive director of the GHI, has played in all this:
