The Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins
Pandemic Prevention Program
The Pandemic Prevention Program aims to fortify global health by conducting pioneering research and policy analysis to enhance preparedness and response to infectious diseases and public health crises.
What problem is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) working on?
CHS's mission is to “protect people’s health from epidemics and disasters and ensure that communities are resilient to major challenges.” It focuses on:
- Improving global health security
- Addressing infectious diseases and epidemics (both naturally occurring and deliberate)
- Strengthening public health disaster response
- Identifying and analysing biological threats
- Advancing recommendations for the responsible use of biotechnology
CHS was founded in 1998 and reports being the first non-governmental organisation dedicated to the study of public health preparedness.
What does CHS do?
CHS is multidisciplinary, bringing together experts and scholars from a wide variety of related fields and connecting them with industry leaders and government officials.
Specifically, CHS:
- Researches scientific advances, technological innovations, and policy approaches that can improve health security, studying “the policies, organisations, systems, and tools to prevent and respond to outbreaks and public health crises” and providing policy advice through a wide variety of projects.
- Facilitates interdisciplinary and international collaborations with experts, policymakers, and the private sector, and is working to educate the next generation of policymakers and public health experts.
- Publishes Health Security, a peer-reviewed journal aimed at practitioners, policymakers, scientists, and government officials in military, scientific, health organisations, and related fields. Health Security publishes research and guidance on issues related to CHS’s focus areas and mission.
- Runs educational programmes and fellowships for students and emerging biosecurity leaders. It also runs the Capitol Hill Steering Committee on Pandemic Preparedness & Health Security, an educational forum in which congressional and federal agency staff meet to discuss improvements to US health security.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of CHS?1.
We previously included the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security as one of our recommended charities based on Founders Pledge’s evaluation highlighting its cost-effectiveness. Founders Pledge found that CHS:
- Has developed an excellent track record of producing quality research, analysis and policy recommendations.
- Has a strong team that combines expertise in bioscience, medicine, public health and security.
- Is a trusted source of independent advice to the US government.
Other indicators of CHS’s cost-effectiveness are:
- Open Philanthropy, a trusted evaluative and impact-focused grantmaking organisation, has awarded several grants to CHS, including its 2019 grant for over $20 million.
- CHS also receives financial support from a number of trusted foundations, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we expect to soon look into Founders Pledge as part of this more in-depth evaluator research, we haven’t yet. As such, we don't currently include CHS as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.