Gary Edson: “Nothing of Significance Happens Without US Leadership”

Gary Edson, President and founder of The Covid Collaborative, has for decades been a highly visible and impactful leader across government, business, and the non-profit worlds. While serving in senior White House positions in President George W. Bush’s administration, he played a key role in the design and launch of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and in the management of G-7 and other summits. He joins us to explore why the international response to Covid-19 has been so radically different from the response two decades ago to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He also walks us through the genesis of the Covid Collaborative, how it operates, its impressive achievements in devising plans of action embraced by governors whose constituents account for one-third of Americans, and its rapid, innovative work on testing, masks, vaccine hesitancy, and school reopening. More recently, the Collaborative has focused (with CSIS) on the stark global split between vaccine ‘haves’ versus ‘have nots,’ at the very moment when two Americas have appeared, the vaccinated and unvaccinated. What gives him hope? “America rises to the occasion.”

Gary Edson is the President of The Covid Collaborative.