| Home > Events > The Public as an Asset, Not a Problem > Monica Schoch-Spana Welcome Transcript [Listen to this talk] DR. SCHOCH-SPANA: I want to extend a warm welcome to all of you. I am Monica Schoch-Spana. I am the Senior Fellow with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. This is one of those moments where it feels like I'm throwing a dinner party and every person who I want to be there has said yes, I'm going to come. So I want to say thank you.
This is going to be our kick-off event to a very important conference on a critical issue that has not yet received the attention that it deserves, and that is the need to both recognize and to support a positive, active role for the general population in responding to a bioterrorist attack. Now I'm going to save my more formal remarks for tomorrow, but our speaker line-up and our attendee list has exceeded our expectations, so I wanted to give warm thanks to all of you for the high level of interest that has been expressed regarding the substance of this conference, and also, the swiftness with which you made time in your very busy schedules, all of you, to take part in this conference and bring it into being.
The goal of this meeting is to synthesize for government and public health authorities essential principles of leadership that encourage the public's constructive collaboration in the context of bioterrorism. This is an issue that people often put in the "too hard" category as Tara O'Toole mentioned earlier today, but I think the level of interest expressed by your participation suggests that it is a complex issue that we have to pay attention to. There has been a necessary maturing of concepts in the emerging field of biodefense such that we are going to wrestle more thoughtfully with the issue of how it is that we help populations help themselves during a public health emergency. So my thanks to all of you for joining this public dialogue on how we can move beyond this prevailing image of a panic-prone public, how we can mobilize a coordinated, collective response among diverse publics and how we can capitalize on everyday institutions such as schools and workplaces and neighborhood associations to help people cope with the public health emergency. I'd like to extend a warm thanks to my colleagues Drs. Tara O'Toole and Tom Inglesby for the intellectual and moral support that they extended during the development of this program and of course beyond that as well.
Our Events Coordinator extraordinaire Andrea Lapp, who I think everyone in this room had a relationship with. (Applause) Dr. SCHOCH-SPANA: A key Research Assistant to the issue of the people's role in biodefense, Ms. Onora Lien. Our webcasting crew and then everyone back at the Biodefense Center who's holding down the fort while the rest of us are here at a party in Washington, D.C. It really has taken the entire staff plus to pull off a conference of this scale and quality. So my thanks to my colleagues. Also, a hearty thanks to our generous funders the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.
Without their support, this critical event couldn't happen, and so my thanks to Paula Olsiewski and Brian Houghton on behalf of their respective institutions for their support.
I'd like to turn the podium over to my colleague Tara O'Toole who'll be introducing our keynote speaker, Dr. Neal Cohen. (Applause) [return to top] | 
