The fight against COVID: Has the U.S. entered a new normal?

Guian McKee is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2002, and is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2008). At the Miller Center, McKee works extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program. His research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s.

J. Stephen Morrison is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C., where he founded and directs its Global Health Policy Center. A political scientist, he has built over the past two decades a highly dynamic and impactful program that concentrates on the geopolitical and national security dimensions of U.S. leadership in international health, with a special emphasis upon the centrality of bipartisanship and multilateral institutions, partnerships with private industry, foundations, advocates and the faith community, and long-term strategic planning and commitments.

Through a series of high-level commissions that he has created and directed, Morrison has spearheaded work that has shaped concrete decisions in Congress and the administration on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, reproductive health and gender equality, immunizations, and health security, including pandemic preparedness, acceleration of technological innovations, and coping with anti-science and a polluted digital world. 

Margaret Foster Riley, Dorothy Danforth Compton Professor at the Miller Center, is professor of law at UVA Law School, professor of public health sciences at the UVA School of Medicine, and professor of public policy at the University’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She also directs the Animal Law Program at the law school.

A scholar working in the intersection of law, regulation, policy, and ethics in the Life Sciences, Riley has written and presented extensively about health care law, biomedical research, genetics, food and drug regulation, reproductive technologies, human and animal biotechnology, and public health. She is currently a member of the NIH NExTRAC, a FACA committee that advises the NIH Director on issues concerning emerging biotechnologies. She served on four National Academies committees: the Committees on Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects, Assessing Toxicological Risks to Human Subjects, Assessment of the Care and Use of Dogs in Biomedical Research Funded by or Conducted at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies to Reduce Prescription Opioid Abuse (consultant to the committee).