Global Health Symposium: The Foreign Policy of Collective Action: Lessons for the Future of Global Health
Event date
From Global Health Program.
This symposium will take stock of the lessons of COVID-19 for the foreign policy of collective action and explore how those lessons should be applied to future global health challenges.
Virtual Session: Global Health Symposium Session I: Lessons from the Collective Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Transcript
BOLLYKY: Great. Good afternoon. So nice of all of you to join us on a beautiful day in Washington, D.C., where there’s so much going on. Topic of today’s symposium is “The Foreign Policy of Collective Action: Lessons for Global Health.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has been, of course, a global tragedy responsible for nearly 20 million in deaths globally as well as tens of trillions of dollars of economic losses. At the start of the crisis many predicted that this would be a watershed moment in world history, remembered in the same sentences with the days that started World War I, or years, rather, that started World War I or World War II or international financial crisis. This would be a watershed moment that would change how we thought about the international order and its role in spurring international cooperation.
But three years later you would be forgiven for concluding otherwise. When you look at the titles of the events around town this week very few of them are indicative of that change in world history. If you listen to the speeches of our leading foreign policymakers you see fewer and fewer references. If you read the writings of our...
Virtual Session: Collective Responses to Other Global Health Threats
Transcript
KICKBUSCH: Well, good afternoon and welcome again to this Council on Foreign Relations meeting on Collective Response to—well, you know. (Laughter.) I got muddled up. “Collective Responses to Other Global Health Threats,” that we are going to look at now. So this is the second session, the final session, of this year’s Global Health Symposium.
I am Ilona Kickbusch. I am the founder and chair of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and I’m the co-chair of the World Health Summit Council. And I’ve been asked to preside over today’s meeting. So I’m delighted all of you are.
And I’d like to underline, again, that we have probably over a hundred online participants. Some of you might have looked at the names of those participants. Quite extraordinary people who are out there listening to our discussions. So we have a fantastic panel here, with the three of the panelists here in person and one panelist online. Very big welcome. And we’ve agreed that we’re not going to read out bios. That you can all check on these wonderful people. You know some of them, of course, quite distinguished speakers.
We have...