Brian McCloskey
Brian McCloskey is senior consulting fellow in the Global Health Programme at Chatham House. Dr. McCloskey was formerly the director of Global Health for Public Health England (PHE). He has worked in public health at the local, regional, national, and international levels for 25 years, including work with the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency (HPA), with a remit for emergency planning and responsibility for cross government aspects of the agency’s response to major emergencies. This included the HPA’s response to the London bombings, the Buncefield Oil Depot fire, the Litvinenko polonium poisoning, flooding incidents, and pandemic flu. He also led planning for the public health services for the 2012 London Olympic Games.
Dr. McCloskey has been working with the World Health Organization's (WHO) Mass Gatherings Advisory Group since 2008, heading up the Collaborating Centre on Mass Gatherings. He served as PHE’s national incident director for Ebola when it became a national incident in 2014 and was then seconded to work with the UN special envoy on Ebola, based in Geneva, until April 2015. He was a member of WHO’s Review Committee on the Role of the International Health Regulations in the Ebola Outbreak and Response (2015), the WHO Emergency Committee on Ebola in the DRC (2018/19), and the Technical Consultation on the IHR and PHEIC declarations (2019). He is an advisor to WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on the Health Security Interface.
He was awarded a CBE for services to public health in January 2013.
The World is Unprepared for the Unthinkable
A biological attack anywhere would have profound and far-reaching political, military, and health consequences