 Good morning, and thank you all for coming this morning to join us for the launch of the CSIS Commission on Smart Global Health Policy. I'm Steve Morrison. I'm the Senior Vice President here at CSIS and Director of the Global Health Policy Center. I want to first thank many of the staff here who put this together. My close colleague Lisa Cardia, career diplomat and global health expert is with us today, joined us at the beginning of the year and has been very instrumental in trying to map out the approach that we've taken and put together the framework that we will hear about today. Suzanne Brundage has had a lead organizing role in putting everything together today aided by Karen Meacham, Emily Poster, Danielle Porter, and Catherine Strifel, and Anin Hageman, and thanks to all of them. I also mentioned that there are a number of papers that were issued that were related to the work of this commission that have been, papers that have been commissioned over the last several months that have been posted. There's a notice that describes these. We have papers by two of our commissioners, Chris Elias, the President, CEO of PATH wrote one on policies and practices to advance global health technologies and excellent fees, which I hope you'll look at. Michael Merson along with his colleague Kim Page, Mike is one of our commissioners, wrote a paper on the dramatic expansion of university engagement and global health. Please look at that. A number of other experts who've worked closely with us have written quite compelling papers, two on security, Harvey Feldbaum from CICE, from Johns Hopkins, wrote on U.S. global health and national security policy, Jean Bonvantra on national security and global health. It's an overview of U.S. military programs and assets. Jennifer Cook, the CSIS Africa program director, has written an excellent paper on Africa, and Catherine Bliss from our America's program has done something similar review of Latin America and the Caribbean. I urge you to look at those. We operate as an institution, as a center in our global health work, very close alliance with the Kaiser Family Foundation and with Jennifer Cates, Diane Roland, Alicia Carbow. We had talked a few months ago about trying to get, to bring forward a good baseline narrative that described U.S. programs, and Kaiser kindly invested quite a bit of effort in putting that together. That's been issued and released today, the U.S. government's global health policy architecture, structure programs, and funding. It's on the Kaiser Family Foundation website. It's an excellent new addition analytically and we're very grateful to that work and we intend to make a full and ample use of that and we will continue in very close partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation as we move forward. We're very excited about this initiative, about this commission on smart global health policy. As you'll see from the list of commissioners and as you'll hear today from the seven commissioners who have agreed to join us, and those include our two co-chairs, Admiral Fallon and Helene Gale. It includes Congressman Keith Ellison, who's with us today. It includes Chris Elias from PAC, Margie McGlynn, the President of Global Vaccines and Infectious Diseases from Merck, Michael Merson, the Director of the Global Health Institute at Duke University, and Pat Mitchell, Patricia Mitchell, the President and CEO of the Paley Center for Media. We have assembled a very diverse, very prominent and impressive group of personalities who are opinion leaders, who are strategic thinkers. We went about assembling this group, deliberately attempting to get the best and the brightest in the global health domain as fully a third of our constituents commissioners. Then we reached out deliberately to prominent personalities and strategic thinkers from the foreign policy world, from the security world, from corporate sector, from media, and from Congress. We have four members from Congress, Senators Snow and Shaheen, Congressman Ellison, who we'll hear from momentarily, and Congresswoman Kate Granger, who has presented us with a draft, with a statement today that Helene will draw from in her comments. This is an exceptional assembly of personalities, and it's an experiment. It's a deliberate effort by us to see if we can mobilize this opinion around trying to have a smarter, more coherent, more long-term and strategic approach on global health. We've got a short timeline. We're going to complete this work by the end of the year and bring it forward with a very concrete action plan. Helene and Bill Fallon will talk more about that. Global health is no question, has grown dramatically in the last and surprisingly in this decade to at least $7.5 billion per year, or 30 percent of U.S. foreign assistance. And if you take, as the Kaiser Family Foundation did, a broader view that encompasses many of the investments made by NIH, by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and others, that figure rises to over $9.5 billion a year. Either way you do the calculations, the numbers are impressive and full and ample evidence of the degree to which global health has risen as a priority. This is our first major focused effort of this new center, the Commission. It builds on seven years of work that we've undertaken with many partner experts and institutions over the last seven years in the work of the CSIS Task Force on HIV AIDS. It's also aired to the CSIS Commission on Smart Power, which completed its work in 2007. That Smart Power Commission put a special spotlight on the achievements and the future potentiality for global health as an area where we can better the lives of millions and improve the standing in the United States and advance U.S. interests across the multiplicity of areas from foreign humanitarian, developmental security and diplomatic stakes. So this will be our priority and we'll hear more today from Helene and Bill and from our commissioners on the roundtables from Congressman Ellison about some of the key things that are in front of us, like how do we achieve higher efficiencies? How do we innovate more strategically? How do we improve our diplomacy to get better leverage out of U.S. influence multilaterally? There are a multitude of other questions that will come forward. Let me just quickly say a few words about Helene and about Bill. Helene Gayle is known to many of you as among the foremost American leaders in global health. She's the president and CEO of CARE. She's a trustee of CSIS. She's a close friend and mentor and an inspiration to many of us who have known her in throughout her very distinguished career. She is a doctor. She's a public health expert. She had distinguished leadership positions at CDC. She became an assistant surgeon general and rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service. I didn't realize until this morning that we were going to have two admirals on this panel. She was the director of the TB, HIV and reproductive health programs at the Gates Foundation during its early rather remarkable sense in the first part of this decade. Bill Fallon, we are very grateful to someone of such a long and distinguished military career as the former commander of the U.S. Central Command at a critical time as the commander of the Pacific Command. Pre- immediately prior to that during the period of the tsunami and many complex other developments in Asia. Bill Fallon came to this issue with an open mind. It wasn't who will describe that we had to really engage and begin to take on the number of probing questions that come naturally when you ask a four-star admiral to come to CSIS and talk about global health. We had to make the case and we're very grateful that he's been willing to take this on. It's very important that we have this mix, this particular blend of expertise and perspectives across the span of security, development, humanitarian and health-based special expertise as we attempt to look forward and chart the course for this next phase of the U.S. engagement on global health. Please join me in honoring and welcoming Bill and Helene as they walk us through this. Following that Helene, I mean Bill Fallon, Admiral Fallon will introduce Congressman Ellison to deliver his remarks and take some questions and answers and then we'll move into the second half of our program which involves two quick roundtables engaging our other commissioners here. So thank you so much. Thank you, Steve. And to all of your team for the real leadership in moving this forward, I'm really excited to be here and to be part of this. I'd like to also acknowledge as Steve did the commissioners who are with us today, Pat Mitchell, Margie McGlynn, Chris Elias and Mike Merson and Congressman Ellison. We couldn't do this without your efforts and without the commitment of your time. If you look at the list, we have a very distinguished list of commissioners, people who have lots of other things on their plate, but they are here because some are here today in person and others have signed up to this because of the high priority that I think people do put attached to this issue. As Steve mentioned, this is what I've been doing most of my life and it's very easy to take for granted that this is an issue that is important to those of us working in global health, but I think it's particularly gratifying when you see the list of people who are not global health professionals who have not spent their life working on this, who feel like this is an issue whose time has come and they want to spend the kind of time and commitment to it and that's why I'm also very pleased to have Bill Fallon as my co-chair in this effort. I think it does represent that we really do, this is a unique moment in history for a lot of reasons and we all throw around these terms moment in history, but I really do think that we have some real opportunities here in ways that we have not had before. First and foremost, the fact that there is a recognition of the importance of this issue, but as Steve mentioned in his opening comments, we do have unprecedented resources. I often mention that when I was heading USAID's AIDS program, my budget at that time for the global AIDS program was $250 million. We just reauthorized the bill for $50 billion expenditure on HIV. I think just as one example, it shows that we do have unprecedented resources in way like we never have had before. We have a real opportunity with an administration that has made global issues and global health a priority building on the foundation that the last administration already committed again with some of the resources, whether PEPFAR, President's Malaria Initiative, et cetera. But I think, as always, the transition in an administration gives opportunities to look at something in a new and fresh way, and I think this administration has the opportunity again to build on some resources and commitment that had not been there previously. I also think this is a time where we do recognize that resources aren't everything. Given the fact that we have resources, this is a time for us to think about how we use them in a better and smarter way. How can we, in a time when we know we are facing economic challenges, look at what resources we do have and use them in a way that can have the greatest opportunity for making a difference? I think this commission wants to step back, look at this in a fresh new way, look at the resources we have, the foundation we have, the years of experience that we have to build on, and look at how do we do it bigger, how do we do it better, smarter, and take advantage of what we already lessons that we can learn. So we want to ask a few questions, and I'm sure that you will come up with many more that will be useful. How does the U.S. capitalize on its current investments? What should we be doing more of? What can we be doing differently? And I think we want to ask those questions in a very open way, in a way that doesn't box us into just how we've done things before. How do we do a better job of measuring impacts and determine clearly what works, but also equally what doesn't work? And being willing to say that we don't have to worry about only saying what have we done well and talk about our successes, but we're equally willing to look at our failures and be rigorous about examining them. How do we achieve greater efficiencies across current programs? All of us who work in the field know the duplicity, duplicating of efforts that often goes on in the field. And I think it's one of the things that is the outgrowth of having more resources. It also means that you've got more actors in the field. And how can we do a better job of rationalizing what we do across the many agencies? And while we're going to focus a lot of our efforts on not surprisingly, how do we influence the policy environment here in Washington, we don't want to neglect the broader field of actors who are now in global health. And again, one of the fortunate things is that we have many private sector resources also flowing into this. So I think we want to look at this in a way that looks more broadly at all the actors and then what's the way that the policy environment here can influence that. And how do we look at the issue of sustainability? It's something we talk about all the time. But I think it's something we don't really truly wrestle with in ways that allow us to say that we can look back in 20 years later, the efforts that we've put in this have not vanished. And we really have looked at a way of looking at a much longer term view of what we do. And I think today's economic situation makes us think even more seriously about the issue of sustainability. And then I think how do we work more smartly with others? And that's both within the U.S. and the range of actors, but also how can we be better actors with the whole global community and look at what our comparative advantage is as the U.S. and really use that for the greatest good. I think I will just, and I want to, before I and just read a little bit from the statement that Congresswoman Granger left us, but just to say finally that I think people ask why now? There have been a lot of reports, there's been a lot of focus on this, and I just acknowledge Patrick Kelly who's here from the Institute of Medicine. The Institute of Medicine is finalizing a major review on global health. The Smart Power Commission, as Steve mentioned, had issues related to the broader issue of global foreign policy, global development, and global health, as well as global health. But I think this is a time where this approach, which is somewhat different from those who can build on those, but look differently. We have made one of our greatest investments as a government in global health, and we look at the dollars that flow for global development overall. Global health is our single, other than military, is our single biggest foreign assistance activity. And so I think it is an important time for us to look at that and examine. So for all these reasons, I think this is an opportune time. I think we've got an incredible group of people pulled together. We look forward to hearing from all of you today, but also we hope to keep you engaged in the future as we continue to think about how to make this report and this commission be useful to all of us in our different endeavors. And let me just close by reading a little bit from the statement from Congresswoman Kay Granger, who couldn't be with us today, but wanted us to know that she is really, really engaged in this effort. And she said, I wanted to thank you for inviting me to participate in this important effort. I'm sorry I couldn't be here in person. Healthcare issues have always been important, so it's an honor to serve on this commission. Serving on this commission is a real opportunity to find solutions that will have an impact on a global level. She goes on to talk about some of the successes in areas that we've already worked on, whether it's pandemic influenza, the HIV prevention and treatment efforts in the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR. And she talks about her own personal travels to South Africa and how she was able to understand firsthand some of the real challenges that are presented in real-world situations. This is the sort of thing that this commission needs to review to make sure we're using our resources in the way that makes the most sense. I think a lot of the things that I've mentioned already are the kinds of things that resonate. How do we take what we know, look at our experience, build on the very successful things that the U.S. government has already been able to do, but look at that in a different way, in a smarter way. In closing, she just says thank you again for this exciting opportunity and look forward to working with all of you over the years. And we're just pleased to have not only her presence, Congressman Ellison that you'll be hearing from, but also Senator Olympia Snow and Gene Shaheen. So we have both key policymakers as a part of this commission as well as the broad range of people from a variety of sectors. And I will just again thank all of you for being here. We look forward to your incredible participation throughout this effort and turn it over to my coach here, Bill Fallon. And thanks again for being here. Dr. Gale, thank you very much and welcome, Congressman Ellison. Distinguished members of the commission, with your incredibly busy schedules to take time to actually come to Washington and be with us this morning is really a great sign of your desire to be a part of what I think is going to be a very, very interesting and hopefully impactful piece of work. And to this very, very large audience, I'm looking at standing room only. I was up in Boston the other night at Fenway Park to the home opener and the fans were standing up on the monster in other places and I think you've got them beaten. So really, really delighted to see everybody here. And you know, you might ask, as Steve said, so what's this old admiral doing up here? What do you know about global health? And the answer is not enough, but I'm learning. But I will give you a perspective. And that is I spent a lot of time, many decades, around the world engaged in various activities and most of them typically involved cleaning up broken china or digging us out of holes that we managed to find ourselves in. And very necessary work and we're very blessed to have so many people in this country willing to help. But I thought many times how it might be different and how if we spend a little bit more time investing in the preventive end of business and taking care of things that I think could be fixed or made better with a relatively modest investment, that maybe we'd find ourselves in a place we position we might like. And so I'm delighted to be able to join Dr. Gale with their distinguished background and in service to mankind and to the many other people who have volunteered their time to come together to work. And why now? It seems to me that we do have a great opportunity. Expectations are incredibly high. As I get around the world today and see people are enthusiastic, they're renewed with a sense of the art of the possible. And the idea here is to see what we can do to fulfill some of those expectations and to try and capitalize on this enthusiasm to actually build a foundation to get something done. Now, this is not going to be easy work as I'm discovering because people like instant results. They like to see things happen right now. And this is an area that's going to require some significant planning and some thoughtful discussion and some prioritization and then some real work to get this done. But I think we have an opportunity and let's see what we can do to take advantage of it. It strikes me that it'll take a while. We're not giving ourselves a whole lot of time here to come up with a way ahead. But in terms of implementation, a lot of these challenges have been with us in the world for a long time. And they're not going to be solved overnight. But we know how to do many of the things that could make things better. It's a matter, it seems to me, of getting the priorities right, finding the right people to pull together and to take advantage of this tremendous interest in making things better. As I look at our country and the immense resources and blessings that we happen to enjoy and in fact, behaviors, we in this nation have been incredibly generous. We are the world's largest donor in health assistance to the world. The sums of money are very large. They ordered $10 billion this past year alone, which is almost double the previous year. And so this is a good trend. There's a lot we can do. But as I look at the way we've been addressing these issues, it's fragmented. And frankly, one of the things that we would expect to do as we get into this work is to take a look at just what we're doing and how we've been doing it and see if there may not be some more efficient ways to leverage our investments and the incredible interest and desire and work that people do to come up with some better long-term results. And ones that are going to be helpful not only to people in the health world, but also to our country. Frankly, people look to this country with its many blessings and capabilities to help around the world. And we can fulfill some of those expectations. And I think we can do it in a manner that might be perceived a little bit better and would help us. As I look back on the years that I spent trying to work in the business of security and stability, fundamental to security these days is basic day-to-day existence for people and how they relate to themselves, to their families, to their environments. And these seemingly small things actually are the building blocks for stability and security. As I was a young officer growing up in the business that I spent 40 years plus doing, it seemed to me that security was pretty well-defined in the business of state actors, this country versus this and borders and of course the Cold War and so forth. I think that today security has proceeded to be much more of a personal thing and health is clearly a major ingredient to that. And so what we're about is to try to see what we can do to build on what we know works and we have an awful lot of knowledge. Dr. Gale and her colleagues and the medical professions have spent their lives figuring this stuff out, working towards new solutions and frankly I think most of them are already pretty well in hand. We just have to figure out how to get them exported and into places that need them and to get results. And I'll end on that with that term. My interest in being here and Dr. Gale and I discovered very quickly that we share a mutual objective and that is to come up with some results. And so that's what we're really about. We are grateful for the wonderful diverse participation of so many commissioners from around the country with their incredible backgrounds and experiences and we hope to leverage that experience to come up with some results that will be beneficial to our country and to people in the world.