A senior executive defense consultant to the South Florida Defense Alliance (www.southfloridadefensealliance.org), Pamela Berkowsky is passionate about the intersections between climate change and national security, technology, and innovation within the Department of Defense. An expert on disaster preparedness and response, Pamela Berkowsky was recently a panelist at the annual meeting of the Southeast & Caribbean Disaster Resiliency Partnership (SCDRP) in Miami. SCDRP, comprised of disaster and resiliency experts from throughout the Southeast United States, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, works to streamline rapid recovery from natural disasters in those coastal communities. The network of SCDRP members from the public, private and non-profit sectors collaborate and share ideas to promote disaster resilience and climate adaptation, and anyone is welcome to join the organization. SCDRP membership is free for students, who represent the next generation of disaster resilience professionals. The student membership plan is designed to enable students' access to SCDRP's members, annual meetings, virtual partnership meetings, newsletters, and a need-based scholarship program. SCDRP participant membership is a cost-free membership plan that offers access to SCDRP's listserv and newsletters for a year. The plan also provides access to monthly virtual partnership meetings.
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A distinguished management executive with a lengthy history of serving in high-level positions in both federal and state governments, Pamela Berkowsky is a senior executive defense consultant with the South Florida Defense Alliance (SFDA). Pamela Berkowsky advises clients on defense innovation as well as the effects of climate change on national security. Given her expertise in biological warfare defense (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/issue/278/5) she is particularly interested in the climate-driven impacts on infectious diseases such as Ebola.
A zoonotic pathogen (capable of animal-to-human transmission), the Ebola virus results in serious hemorrhagic fever in humans. Primary symptoms of Ebola virus are fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, and unexplained bruising. The first human viral vaccine against Ebola is Ervebo. Also known as V920 or rVSV-ZEBOV, Ervebo was approved by the European Union in November 2019 via conditional marketing authorization. Conditional marketing authorization is reserved for highly sought-after drugs that must be fast-tracked to facilitate commercial availability to address critical unmet medical needs. Ervebo is designed to fight the most lethal strain of ebola virus, Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV), and is especially effective when deployed with a ring vaccination strategy. According to data from the CDC, EBOV causes death in 70 to 90 percent of cases where the disease is left untreated. In December, 2019 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Ervebo for vaccination of people 18 years and older. Ervebo does not provide protection against EBOV counterparts (other species of Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus species). While Ervebo is not yet commercially marketed in the United States, frontline health workers such as Ebola virus disease responders, biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory workers and support staff, and healthcare personnel at federally approved Ebola Treatment Centers are eligible for Ervebo vaccination if there is exposure to the virus. Former Pentagon official Pamela Berkowsky is the President of Blue Sapphire Strategies, a public affairs and business consultancy. With extensive experience in military affairs, Pamela Berkowsky now serves as a Senior Executive Defense Consultant to the South Florida Defense Alliance (SFDA), an organization that supports military efforts and economic development in quad-county south Florida.
The United States military has not been impervious to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, with significant impacts on training, operating tempo, the supply chain and defense industrial base, the granting of security clearances and the defense budget. The numbers tell part of the story; as of the end of August 2020, almost 53,000 DOD-related COVID-19 cases (including military personnel, civilians, dependents and contractors) have been reported. To control the spread of the virus, the Department of Defense implemented guidelines for work and travel, including a hold on permanent changes of station. The Department of Defense has also been visibly engaged in global coronavirus response, contributing its equipment and expertise to the effort. This wide-ranging support includes actions ranging from the Department’s role at home in Operation Warp Speed (the effort to expedite vaccine development and delivery), to the National Guard’s support for community food banks, testing sites across the country, and the coordination with state officials to inspect eldercare facilities; and abroad, including the delivery of pandemic supplies to allies in the southern hemisphere and elsewhere. Pamela Berkowsky serves as a Senior Executive Defense Consultant to the South Florida Defense Alliance (SFDA), a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization that seeks to unite, support and grow the defense community and DOD investments and infrastructure in South Florida – to include the quad-county areas of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties (see https://www.southfloridadefensealliance.org/about-us-1). Prior to her defense-related economic development and resiliency work in Florida, Pamela Berkowsky had a distinguished career in the Pentagon. Spanning three Presidential administrations, her DOD tenure culminated with an appointment to serve as Assistant Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense, a position in which she focused on defense support to civil authorities, among other issues.
On August 3, 2020, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum extending “the use of the (Florida) National Guard to respond to COVID-19 and to facilitate economic recovery.” Following direct gubernatorial appeals in the wake of rising coronavirus cases, only Florida and Texas received such extensions at that time. The August memorandum extended the federal government’s 100% cost-sharing through the end of the calendar year, a significant financial benefit. Throughout the pandemic, the Guard’s coronavirus response work in Florida has been conducted under Title 32 status in which the governor remains in command while the federal government bears the full costs. The Florida Guard has been deployed in a number of roles, including assembling testing kits, setting up and manning community-based testing facilities, distributing PPE and constructing field hospitals. In May 2020, DOD recognized the 256th Medical Company Area Support (MCAS) arm of the Florida National Guard for its COVID-19 response efforts. The soldiers of the 256th MCAS were involved in a number of tasks supporting civilian hospitals: collecting specimens, conducting quality assurance, and training other health professionals. Soldiers also served as liaisons among hospital administrative personnel, nursing facilities, the Health Department, and other military units, and others provided assistance to mobile units around the state of Florida and trained non-medical personnel (truck drivers and military intelligence members). According to the governor’s office, by early August approximately 1,400 guardsmen and women were engaged statewide in pandemic response efforts, about 5% of the nationwide total. Former DOD and U.S. Virgin Islands official Pamela Berkowsky ran the territory’s interagency H1N1 Task Force in 2009. The current president of Blue Sapphire Strategies, a public affairs and business advisory consulting firm, Pamela Berkowsky has also managed a state-of-the-art medical practice in the Virgin Islands. Recently, she was interviewed regarding the impact of coronavirus in the Caribbean for an article which appeared in Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2020/04/13/covid-19-coronavirus-in-paradise-how-the-caribbean-is-being-hit/#60f545092296). In it, she noted that while island “communities plan year-round for natural disasters, it is unclear whether the infrastructure can handle this (the pandemic), especially in such fragile economies dependent largely on tourism.” Additionally, according to Berkowsky, the islands will be “months behind the economic recovery curve,” and “when other [economies] are back, Caribbean recovery will lag.”
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the region’s tourism industry will indeed experience a slow recovery. To prevent the spread of the virus, many countries in the Caribbean region closed their borders and instituted quarantine guidelines and social distancing regulations. The economic effects of these dramatic measures were felt immediately in the region where tourism accounts for up to 50-90% of GDP and employment. While some islands have successfully impeded the virus and their economies are slowly reopening, the IMF projects that the tourism industry may take up to three years to return to pre-pandemic levels. In a region already severely impacted by the financial aftershocks of recent natural disasters – declining credit ratings, limited commercial borrowing capacity, decreased revenue and constrained ability to mobilize resources – there is heightened concern that the financial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic may plunge the region into a deep recession. International organizations including the IMF, World Bank, ECLAC, and other regional partners are mobilizing to address debt relief proposals and increasing access to concessional funding in order to assist the vulnerable economies of the region in steering through the unstable waters ahead. Pamela Berkowsky is former government official with expertise in disaster preparedness and response. She served in senior positions in the Pentagon, including the Department of the Navy, and is president of Blue Sapphire Strategies, a boutique public affairs business consultancy. As a Senior Executive Defense Consultant to the South Florida Defense Alliance, Pamela Berkowsky focuses on defense innovation and resiliency issues, including the impact of climate change on military installations, personnel and operations. There is little dispute that melting sea ice is creating new Arctic sea routes that will link major trading ports and open new territories for tourism. The melting ice is also enabling commercial exploration of the region’s rich resources; it is believed the Arctic may hold up to a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and untapped gas reserves, not to mention substantial gold, zinc, and platinum reserves. Insofar as these resources and their strategic location make the Arctic vital to US interests and national security, it is also becoming a new geographic focus of military competition with Russia, which has heavily invested in its own commercial presence and military capabilities in the region.
In August, 2020, the Russian Navy conducted major war games in the Bering Sea, what its chief, Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov referred to as “massive drills… for the first time ever… building up our forces to ensure the economic development of the region.” With the involvement of more than 50 ships, 40 aircraft, multiple cruise missile launches and even an Omsk nuclear submarine which surfaced near Alaska, the Russian exercises drew the careful attention and response of the U.S. Northern Command, the U;S; Coast Guard and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which sent fighter jets to intercept Russian maritime patrol aircraft flying in close proximity to Alaska. According to an AP News report, NORAD’s commander, General VanHerck stated: “This year, we’ve conducted more than a dozen intercepts, the most in recent years. The importance of our continued efforts to project air defense operations in and through the north has never been more apparent.” It is also apparent that the Arctic will only continue to grow as an area of increasingly intense competition as both the United States and Russia seek to expand their military and commercial presence in the region. |
AuthorA resident of the U.S. Virgin Islands since 2002, Pamela B. Berkowsky took her most recent governmental management role in 2007, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff to Gov. John de Jongh Jr. Thriving in this position, in which she managed daily Government House and Cabinet operations and policy development and implementation, she was promoted to Chief of Staff in 2011. Archives
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