Mike Ryan

Mike Ryan   (Pharmaceutical lobbyist, surgeon)
Born	1965
Nationality	Irish
Alma mater	National University of Ireland, University College Dublin
WHO exec with close ties to the pharma industry

Michael "Mike" Joseph Ryan is an Irish former trauma surgeon and epidemiologist specialising in infectious disease and public health. Ha has worked with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on several occasions, both in the WHO and outside it. He has a long career in the World Health Organization, and is now is Executive Director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme where he leads the team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19.

Ryan participated in Event 201, by many seen as a dry run for the Covid-19 measures.

Early life and education

Ryan is from the Ireland. Ryan trained in medicine at the National University of Ireland in Galway. He received training in orthopaedics in Scotland. Ryan has a Masters of Public Health from University College Dublin. He later completed specialist training in communicable disease control, public health and infectious disease at the Health Protection Agency in London. Ryan also completed the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET).

Career

Early career

In July 1990, Ryan moved to Iraq with his girlfriend, later his wife, to train Iraqi doctors. Very shortly after his arrival the Invasion of Kuwait happened, which suspended his work and meant he and his wife were made to work as doctors under captivity, often working under duress. A military convoy ran a vehicle Ryan was in off the road, crushing multiple vertebrae. Eventually Ryan and his wife were allowed to leave Iraq due to their injuries. Ryan's severe back injury prohibited him from working as a surgeon. He made a shift into the fields of public health and infectious disease.

Ryan has held leadership positions and has worked on various outbreak response teams in the field to eradicate the spread of diseases including bacillary dysentery, cholera, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, measles, meningitis, relapsing fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and Shigellosis.

After Iraq, Ryan worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on their efforts to stamp out infectious diseases in Africa.

Career at WHO

In 1996, Ryan joined the World Health Organization to work in a newly opened unit that focused on epidemics and infectious diseases under the direction of the infectious disease expert, David L. Heymann. He developed measles outbreak response guidelines as part of the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) team who implemented surveillance for acute flaccid paralysis, which is how polio is eradicated.

From 2000 to 2003, Ryan was coordinator of Epidemic Response at the WHO. In 2001, he was based in Uganda where he was head of a team of international experts involved in the containment of the Ebola epidemic. During this time, he was in areas of conflict in areas like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where aid workers were often attacked and murdered. In 2003, he also worked as an Operational Coordinator on the SARS outbreak.

From 2005 to 2011, Ryan was Director of Global Alert and Response Operations for the WHO. During this time he worked on the development of the WHO's Strategic Health Operations Centre and Event Management System. He worked on the implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHR), among other duties to do with infectious disease and emergency responses to pathogens and epidemics. This includes the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, where a change in WHO's bureaucratic definitions of what a pandemic is, led to a premature and very costly (or lucrative, for pharmaceutical companies) official declaration of a pandemic.

In 2011, Ryan left the WHO and returned to Ireland, to work on the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, where he worked until 2017 and re-joined the WHO.

In the early days of the Ebola crisis, Ryan was a field epidemiologist, field coordinator, operational coordinator or director during the majority of the reported Ebola outbreaks in Africa. From 2014 to 2015, he served as a Senior Advisor to the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) in West Africa. He worked in the field in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

From 2013 to 2017, Ryan worked in the Middle East as Senior Advisor on Polio Eradication and Emergencies for the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).The goal was to eradicate polio from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He coordinated operational and technical support to polio outbreak response activities in the region which included Syria and Iraq. In 2014, Director General Margaret Chan appointed Ryan to the WHO Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, which was co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann. During this time he was based in Islamabad, Pakistan at the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC), where he liaised with the Government of Pakistan.

From 2017 to 2019, Ryan served as Assistant Director-General for Emergency Preparedness and Response in WHO's Health Emergencies Programme. In 2019, he was part of the leadership that created the Global Preparedness Report for the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

In 2019, Ryan became Executive Director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme replacing Peter Salama in an internal reshuffle.

As part of his work with the World Health Organization, Ryan appears in regular press conferences by the WHO regarding the 2019-2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Ryan has provided answers to common questions about strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and find a vaccine. Based on his experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Ebola, Ryan has said that while physical distancing, lock-downs, and movement restrictions will stop the spread of COVID-19, eradicating the virus will require large scale public health interventions with a focus on the central tenets of containment: community-based surveillance, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine.

In addition to his activities at WHO, Ryan has worked as a Professor of International Health at University College Dublin. He has taught and lectured on medicine and public health on the undergraduate and post graduate level.

Other activities

• Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), Founding Member
• Informal Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, Member
• WHO Health Emergencies Programmes, Independent Oversight and Advisory Committee (2016-2017)

Ryan is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
2021 Monkeypox Tabletop Exercise				A 2021 biological exercise which (presciently) predicted the monkeypox pandemic which started in mid May 2022
Catastrophic Contagion	23 October 2022	23 October 2022	Belgium Brussels	An preparation exercise laying the groundwork for a "pandemic" for two areas that largely avoided the "Covid jab" - children and the continent of Africa.
Event 201	18 October 2019	18 October 2019	New York US	A Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security/World Economic Forum/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored large scale simulation of a global coronavirus pandemic predicting an apocalyptic outcome. Held October 2019.
Munich Security Conference/2019	15 February 2019	17 February 2019	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 55th Munich Security Conference, which included "A Spreading Plague" aimed at "identifying gaps and making recommendations to improve the global system for responding to deliberate, high consequence biological events."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2013	23 January 2013	27 January 2013	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2500 mostly unelected leaders met to discuss "leading through adversity"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2014	22 January 2014	25 January 2014	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2604 guests in Davos considered "Reshaping The World"
WEF/Annual Meeting/2017	17 January 2017	20 January 2017	World Economic Forum Switzerland	2950 known participants, including prominently Bill Gates. "Offers a platform for the most effective and engaged leaders to achieve common goals for greater societal leadership."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland	"The reality is that we are in a Cold War [against China] that threatens to turn into a hot one."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2020	21 January 2020	24 January 2020	World Economic Forum Switzerland	This mega-summit of the world's ruling class and their political and media appendages happens every year, but 2020 was special, as the continuous corporate media coverage of COVID-19 started more or less from one day to the next on 20/21 January 2020, coinciding with the start of the meeting.

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References

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