Victor Zonana, Founder and Chair of Global Health Strategies, is an award-winning journalist and communications professional who has worked at the highest levels of government, the news media and civil society. Prior to establishing Global Health Strategies with David Gold, Victor was founding Vice President for Communications of The Vaccine Fund, which was established with a US$750 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He was Vice President for Communications of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative between 1998 and 2001, where he planned and executed a focused communications strategy that catapulted AIDS vaccines onto the global policy agenda.
During the first five years of US President Bill Clinton’s administration, Victor served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs of the Department for Health and Human Services. He worked directly on a daily basis with Health Secretary Donna E. Shalala, staffing her at such gatherings as the World Health Assembly in Geneva and representing the department at international AIDS conferences in Berlin, Yokohama and Vancouver. He was also the department’s press liaison with the White House and had oversight over press operations at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
Before joining the government, Victor, who is fluent in English and French, was a journalist for The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times. He is the 1990 winner of the John Hancock award for distinguished financial journalism and was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. Victor has developed media strategies and orchestrated the placement of editorials and positive news coverage about his employers in such publications and broadcast media as The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Le Monde, CNN, and the BBC. Victor received his BA Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College.
