A vaccine visionary reflects: Seth Berkley's global memoir is a shot worth taking
Former Gavi CEO Dr Seth Berkley's tell-all dissection of the effort to tackle the worst pandemic in a century offers 'a vital, occasionally provocative read'
- 24 October 2025
- 3 min read
- by Pascal Barollier
In a publishing season crowded with memoirs from icons and technocrats, Seth Berkley’s forthcoming book – his first major publication since stepping down as CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – arrives with the quiet force of a well-placed syringe: precise, potent, and not without a sting.
Doctor Berkley, whose career spans epidemiological fieldwork in Uganda to boardroom battles over global vaccine equity, offers a panoramic account of the last three decades in global health. The book, which hits shelves on 28 October 2025, is part memoir, part manifesto, and part behind-the-scenes exposé of the machinery that powers (and sometimes stalls) public health progress.
Naming names...
What makes this book compelling isn’t just the résumé—though few can rival Berkley’s role in founding IAVI, steering Gavi through the COVID-19 storm, and co-launching COVAX. It’s the candour with which he interrogates the compromises and contradictions of global health diplomacy. Berkley doesn’t shy away from naming names, nor does he pretend that the vaccine world is free of ego, inertia, or geopolitical gamesmanship. If anything, he leans into the messiness, offering readers a rare glimpse into the moral calculus of immunisation campaigns, donor politics, and the race to save lives at scale.
The prose is brisk, occasionally clinical, but often laced with dry wit. Berkley’s reflections on the “sector’s answer to Tom Cruise” moniker—bestowed by a journalist—are self-aware and amusing, and his anecdotes from Davos, Geneva, and dusty field clinics are delivered with the kind of narrative timing that suggests he’s been saving them for this very moment.
Too diplomatic?
Still, the book is not without its blind spots. Berkley’s admiration for public-private partnerships sometimes veers into evangelism, and readers hoping for a deeper reckoning with the limitations of the COVAX model may find the analysis a bit too diplomatic. There’s also a tendency to frame setbacks as temporary glitches rather than systemic flaws—a perspective that may frustrate critics of the global health establishment.
But to dwell on these would be to miss the book’s larger achievement: it is a testament to the power of persistence, of science in service of equity, and of leadership that dares to be both strategic and humane. Berkley’s voice—equal parts doctor, diplomat, and disruptor—is one the global health community needs, especially as it braces for the next pandemic and the long tail of COVID-19.
This is not just a book for insiders. It’s for anyone who has ever wondered how vaccines reach the world’s poorest children, why some diseases get attention while others languish, and what it takes to move needles—literally and figuratively—on a global scale.
Verdict: A vital, occasionally provocative read from one of global health’s most influential figures. Not perfect, but perfectly timed.
This is an independent book review and does not necessarily reflect the views of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, for which the book’s author served as CEO from 2011-2023.
Fair Doses: An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity by Dr Seth Berkley will be published by University of California Press on 28 October 2025.
