With increased evidence of new COVID-19 variants rapidly spreading in several countries, there are serious concerns about absence of a comprehensive approach to ensure equitable vaccine access in low and middle income countries.  Failure of mass immunization in all continents threatens to prolong the pandemic and thereby delay the global economic recovery.

To discuss these topics the CIC National Capital Branch has invited two distinguished Canadian experts on global public health, Dr. Samuel Oti and Dr. Rochelle Burgess. Elizabeth Kingston, President of the CIC National Capital Branch, will deliver the opening and closing remarks.

Speakers:

Dr. Sam Oti, MD PhD, is a senior program specialist in the Global Health division of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Prior to joining IDRC, Sam was theme leader for the noncommunicable disease research program at the top ranked global health think tank in Africa, the African Population and Health Research Center. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, a member of the International Society of Global Health, and founding secretary-general of the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa. He is the 2015 winner of the Millennium Promise Award: Emerging Research Leader in Non-Communicable Chronic Disease Research awarded by the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a 2013 alumnus of the East African Social Science Translation Fellowship Program at the Center for Effective Global Action, University of California, Berkeley. He will speak on the political economy of vaccine production in Africa, the responses of African governments to vaccine hoarding and nationalism in the Global North, and the future of diplomacy in vaccine procurement and delivery on the continent.

Dr. Rochelle Burgess will moderate this event. She is a Lecturer in Global Health and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health, University College London (UCL). She is the founder and Director of UCL’s Global Network on Mental Health and Child Marriage.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, member of the ESRC peer review college, European Young Academy and the UK Trauma Council, among other affiliations. She is a leading community health psychologist who specialises in community-based approaches to health. Her work studies the social and psychological dynamics of health using qualitative, participatory, and transformative methodologies. She is interested in the promotion of community approaches to health globally, and views communities as a route to understanding and responding to the political economy of poor health, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of broader development issues such as power, poverty, gender, systems of governance, and community mobilisation (civil society). For the past decade she has focused largely on mental wellbeing and common mental disorders and is a leading voice in the emerging field of social interventions in Global Mental Health. She has led a range of projects that focus on the development of community mental health interventions (in South Africa, Colombia, UK and Zimbabwe) and has contributed her methodological and mental health expertise to projects on community led responses to other health challenges, such as child health in Nigeria. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, she has written extensively to advocate for community oriented and locally driven responses to the pandemic, leading pieces in The Lancet and Nature. She holds a BSc(hons) in Psychology from McMaster University, and MSc and PhD in Health, Community and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences in the UK. She has held visiting fellowships at LSE Centre for Africa, University of KwaZulu Natal, and is a Research Associate at University of Johannesburg.

Elizabeth Kingston will deliver the opening and closing remarks. She is the President of the CIC-National Capital Branch. Recently retired, she had a career of 35 years with the Parliament of Canada as a Procedural Clerk, holding numerous positions including Clerk of the Standing Committees on Finance, Public Accounts, Aboriginal Affairs, Industry as well as the Special Joint Committee on the Meech Lake Accord. She has also served as Executive Secretary to the Canada – United States Inter-parliamentary Group, the Canada-China and Canada-Japan Parliamentary Associations, the Canada-United Kingdom Parliamentary Association and the Canadian Branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Elizabeth served as Executive Secretary to the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP), which serves to strengthen the participation of women in politics, government and society. She served as both a short term and long term observer for the presidential, then parliamentary, elections in Ukraine in the spring and summer of 2019. Elizabeth recently returned from Guyana and Ukraine as an election observer for their elections in January and November 2020. Elizabeth holds a Master’s degree in French Literature and is presently working on a Master’s degree in Theology.

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