Draft:Anand Reddi

Anand Reddi is a health system strengthening policy expert and global health advocate known for his scholarly and advocacy work on global HIV scale-up including the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). . Currently, he works in the biotech industry advancing global access to medicines and building public-private health partnerships. He previously was on the global health not-for-profit board of directors of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and the Bay Area Global Health Alliance.

Early Life and Education
Reddi was born in Maryland, USA. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, focusing on pediatric antiretroviral scale-up under the mentorship of Hoosen Coovadia at the PEPFAR funded Sinikithemba HIV/AIDS clinic at McCord Hospital. Reddi pursued a medical degree at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Global Health Research
In the early 2000s it was uncertain if the provision of antiretroviral therapy in resource limited settings such as Southern Africa was feasible. Reddi's research demonstrated that pediatric antiretroviral therapy is effective despite the challenges of a resource limited setting. These data were important in providing supporting implementation experience to HIV scale-up initiatives by PEPFAR and The Global Fund. His scholarly work has appeared in AIDS, Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes and Science. He also has written opinion pieces in The Huffington Post, The New York Times and The Washington Post on global health and U.S. domestic healthcare issues.

Reddi's advocacy brought attention to the flatlining of global AIDS funding by U.S. President Barack Obama's administration in 2010. Within six hours, Ezekiel Emanuel, President Obama's senior adviser for Health Policy, responded directly to Reddi by writing in The Huffington Post: "Contrary to what Dr. Reddi argues, neither I nor the Obama Administration sees an "either-or" trade-off between PEPFAR and other global health priorities such as improving maternal-child health". Reddi rebutted Emanuel's op-ed with a follow-up op-ed that resulted in the restoration of $366 million for antiretroviral scale-up in Uganda.

In 2011, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) launched a campaign against the Food and Drug Administration review of Truvada for use as a HIV Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) drug. Reddi resigned from the Board of Directors of AHF over their opposition to HIV PrEP writing: "AHF’s media campaign against FDA review of PrEP is myopic, blinded by its determination to derail a promising new medication." In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended that people at substantial risk of HIV infection should be offered tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF)-based oral PrEP as an additional HIV prevention option.

To address the shortage of healthcare workers in resource limited settings such as Southern Africa, Reddi proposed the utilization of human capital contracts for global health building on the work of the Noble Prize in Economic Sciences winner Milton Friedman. The idea proposed is that an investor, such as a donor nation, charitable foundation like the Gates Foundation, or global health initiative, will cover the entire cost of a student's medical training. In exchange, the student will work for the first 10 years of their medical career in a government or NGO sponsored health clinic in their respective country of medical education. Their medical license will be contingent on this obligatory national service. Additionally, a multilateral “binding” agreement between the African country and destination countries (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States)-brokered by the investor- could prevent migration during the term period to mitigate the potential for "brain-drain".

At Gilead Sciences, Reddi spearheaded one of the largest HIV Test & Treat projects in collaboration with The Vatican in Shinyanga, Tanzania. The public private partnership between the biotech industry, the Vatican, Tanzanian government and HIV/AIDS NGOs such as Doctors with Africa CUAMM and Joep Lange's Amsterdam Institute of Global Health and Development pioneered a decentralized HIV test & treat outreach campaign to find at-risk populations, ultimately testing over 300,000 people and linking those HIV-positive to treatment. Outcomes from the Tanzania Test & Treat project between May 2017 and June 2019 were 255,329 HIV tests performed and the overall HIV positivity rate was 1.2%.