Looking Back, Looking Ahead, but First, Wishing You a Happy Holiday and New Year

From our CGD family to you and yours, we wish you a happy holiday season and a healthier and happier 2021. And, let me offer an enthusiastic farewell to 2020.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year impacted our entire global family to a person. But for those of us who work every day to advance research, ideas, and policies for more equitable and sustainable global development—as one of our dedicated readers, we count you in that group, too!—the pandemic raised new questions and concerns: Would millions of people fall back into poverty? How would economic lockdowns and school closures impact health and well-being? When will vaccines be approved? And backing up from that important question, how is the global medical supply chain doing, which will facilitate vaccines ultimately reaching billions of people?

As we prepare to continue conducting and releasing timely, impactful research and analysis in 2021—our 20^th anniversary year—I want to share with you just some of the ways CGD influenced and shaped the response to and recovery from COVID-19:

• Drawing on his emergency preparedness experience in government and nonprofits, Jeremy Konyndyk sounded early alarms in The Washington Post and NowThis to help leaders try and get ahead of the coming storm.

• Gyude Moore, the former Minister of Public Works in Liberia, helped steer his country through the Ebola crisis and was busy sharing lessons learned.

• As early as late March, Kalipso Chalkidou was looking at and raising questions about the unintended consequences of lockdowns and other policies.

• Dave Evans and Mead Over’s early look at the economic fallout of COVID-19 remains our most read blog of the year and CGD’s history.

• Masood Ahmed called on policymakers in the international financial institutions to spend what it takes to help poor countries fight the pandemic.

• Parents, teachers, and other community leaders were wondering about schools and kids from the outset of the pandemic, and our 2^nd and 3^rd most read blogs of the year were an open letter to an Education Minister from Susannah Hares and a look at cases in the context of school reopenings from members of our education team.

• Amanda Glassman and Brin Datema offered a timely, facts-first look at the ill-advised decision of the US to leave WHO.

• CGD’s most read paper of the year was Justin Sandefur and colleagues’ predictions of COVID-19 infection fatality rates worldwide, driving coverage in The Economist and elsewhere.

• Prashant Yadav, our global health supply chain expert, was a frequent and substantive contributor to USA Today’s ‘clock’, showing what time it was in the race for a vaccine.

• Anthony McDonnell led colleagues in a paper and interactive tool predicting the success of various vaccines.

• And when the world woke up to the welcome news of Pfizer BioNTech’s successful vaccine trial results, Rachel Silverman was asking smart questions about what it meant for low and middle income countries, taking her message to National Public Radio.

• Liliana Rojas-Suarez was mindful of banks’ role in preventing a financial crisis on top of the pandemic’s health and economic impacts. In collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank, she makes a series of recommendations for financial stability in Latin America and the Caribbean. Read their International Banker piece.

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Thank you for your ongoing interest in and support of our work. CGD will be closed from December 24-January 1, to rest and recharge and reflect on the year that was. We hope you can do a bit of the same.