Emily Bass joined The Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute in July 2021 as Director of Communications and Advocacy, where she’ll support the mission of transforming data use to prevent pandemic outbreaks within 100 days of detection through sharp, clear communication and strategic action.
Emily Bass has more than two decades of experience as a journalist, advocate, and activist working on the frontlines of the global AIDS response. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, and many other publications; she is the author of To End a Plague: America’s Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa. Most recently, she was the Director of Strategy and Content at AVAC, where she developed strategic action campaigns focused on a comprehensive pandemic response, and co-led a transnational coalition of civil society advocates in East and Southern Africa focused on generating and analyzing data as part of the effort to hold decision-makers accountable for results.
Authored Content
Dec 28 2021 Field Note Vaccine Inequity Increases the Risk of New SARS-CoV-2 Variants Emerging Robust genomic surveillance, along with transparency, communication, and global collaboration, is needed to detect and control emerging variants. To control the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on member states to meet a goal of vaccinating 40% of their population by the end of 2021. As of mid December 2021, over 8.6 billion […]
Dec 01 2021 Blog Post Genomic Surveillance Is Essential To Track Covid-19 Variants in Both Unvaccinated and Vaccinated Populations Technological advancements have made sequencing quicker and more affordable, but collaboration, outreach, and trust are needed to achieve representative samples from underserved populations. The course of the Covid-19 pandemic depends not only on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus changes, but on how communities respond to it. Public health officials can only make decisions to protect their […]
Nov 09 2021 Blog Post The Critical Challenge of Tracking Breakthrough Infections, and Why We Still Need Better Data Standards Despite ample vaccine supplies, outbreaks among unvaccinated populations in the US and the appearance of the Delta variant promote infection in fully vaccinated individuals. These breakthrough infections must be carefully tracked. As the percentage of Americans considered fully vaccinated reached 58 percent, and Covid-19-related deaths surpassed three quarters of a million, concerns over breakthrough infections […]