Good morning.
I'm Lloyd Minor,
Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine.
It's a pleasure to welcome you
to this virtual symposium,
The Pandemic Puzzle: Lessons from COVID-19.
We're so pleased that you could join us.
I want to begin by expressing our thanks
to our teams at Stanford Medicine
and the Stanford Graduate School of Business
for the tireless effort
that they've devoted
to planning this symposium,
dating back over many months.
And special thanks
to former Stanford University trustee
and long-time Stanford supporter, Brook Byers.
Brook's advice and input
has been tremendously valuable
at every stage of the planning process.
Now, when Jon Levin,
the Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford,
and I began discussing the idea,
the notion of having
a symposium on the pandemic,
it was during the dark days
of the winter of 2020/2021.
And then, and we were experiencing
our surge in cases in the Bay Area
at that time in January of 2021.
Then it seemed like, well,
the vaccines were being distributed,
and we were starting to see some decline
in numbers of cases
here in the Bay Area.
And surely by summer,
we'll be beyond COVID-19
and we can plan a symposium
for the fall that would be a retrospective
and looking forward on what we can learn
in order to mitigate
and prevent pandemics in the future.
Well, as we all know,
that's not the case.
Because of the Delta variant
and because of vaccine hesitancy,
COVID is very much still with us
here in the United States
and around the world.
But we still want this symposium
to be about looking at the past,
learning from the past,
but very much focused on the future.
So, what can the past 18 months
teach us about the next 18 months?
How can we learn lessons from the response,
from what went well,
from what didn't go well,
and be better prepared for the future?
We do want the symposium
to be focused on looking forward.
We've planned three sessions
as a part of this virtual symposium.
Pardon me, four sessions
of this virtual symposium
over the next three months,
and there will be participants
in the symposium who are leaders
in academia, government, business and healthcare.
Today, we're going to be focused
on the response of the United States
as well as the international response to COVID-19.
How is it organized?
What was the role of nations, governments,
and the private sector in the response?
How can we learn
from what's gone on so far
and better coordinate responses
in the future,
as well as to address threats
to public health, economies, and society?
Our three subsequent sessions
after today's session will cover
other critical topics,
such as achieving health equity
and inclusive recovery,
defining the tools and techniques
needed to track and mitigate pandemics,
and building upon
the remarkable biomedical advances
that we've seen so powerfully displayed
during this pandemic.
We hope that through these four sessions,
we'll be able to have
a more complete picture
of the challenges surrounding COVID-19
and the path forward.
We want to extend a very special thanks
to our speakers for the time
and effort that they've put
into preparing for these sessions
and also for devoting their times
and energize to their presentations today
and in the subsequent sessions.
And, of course,
to you, our participants,
thank you again for joining us.
A few logistics about today.
Our website, which you used
in order to access today's session,
PandemicPuzzle.Stanford.edu,
our website also has a location on it
where you can enter your questions.
Our moderators will prompt you
when you can enter the questions,
and then we have people here
associated with the conference
who will receive the questions
and then pass those questions along to us.
So, we'll have more
to say about that as it comes up.
But again, the website will enable you
to navigate and ask questions in real time.
It's now my pleasure
to turn the program over to Jon Levin,
the Dean of the Graduate School at Stanford.
Jon.
Great, well, thank you, Lloyd
and let me echo Dean Minor
in thanking you all for joining.
The last 18 months have been
impactful in so many ways,
in our health,
in our lives,
in the way here at Stanford
and elsewhere education has been disrupted.
The effect on jobs and businesses,
the economic impact,
the disruption of the global economy
that we're still feeling.
The massive economic response of governments
here in the U.S. and elsewhere.
And of course, also innovation,
in some cases inspiring innovation,
like the efforts to develop new vaccines.
We put together this series of events
with the idea that we'll probably
be thinking about and reflecting on,
and studying and learning from
this episode of history
for years, for decades.
But that even though we're not out of it,
as Dean Minor has said,
and we're farther from being out of it
than we thought when we started
planning this event,
that it was not too early to start
to reflect on and think about
what were the lessons
that we could learn
from the experience of the pandemic?
What could we take away for future pandemics?
How would the world be different
as a result of this experience
that we've gone through?
And the purpose of this series
would not necessarily
be to answer every question
or to give the final word.
Rather it would be
to lay out a set of questions,
to spark discussion and debate,
to get people thinking about
how would the world be different?
What could we learn from this experience?
How could we have a more sustainable
and resilient future
as a result of learning something
from this experience?
And we felt it would be
important to do that at Stanford.
That we are thinking all across our campus
about what can we learn
from the experience of the pandemic
at the medical school,
about the consequences
for public health systems,
for public health,
for medical innovation,
for healthcare here at the business school,
where we just welcomed our students
back for happily an in-person academic year.
Thinking about how will we prepare students
to be leaders in a post-COVID world
that we know will be different
and will place different demands on business?
Work will be different,
organizations will be different,
the global economy
will be reshaped as a result of this.
And I'm really excited
for the series of events
that we're going to have,
and what we're going to learn,
and who we're going to hear from.
I'm very grateful to Brook Byers,
and our teams at the medical school
and business school
who helped us to put this event together.
Thrilled that we have such esteemed speakers.
Really looking forward to lively discussion today.
And I hope we're going
to offer some topics,
and panels and sessions
that will inspire insight
and provoke some thinking.
And with that, I'll turn it back
to Dean Minor to kick things off.