How Much is Your Health Worth? The Human and Economic Value of Health in the Era of COVID-19

Contributor(s): Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Dr Clare Wenham | As part of our online public events programme, we are pleased to invite you to a unique session with: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization; Mariana Mazzucato, Chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All and Professor of the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL) and author of Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism; and Clare Wenham, Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at LSE. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed extraordinary challenges to all sectors of society and underscored the centrality of human health and well-being to the very survival of economies and societies at large. It has exposed the great social disparities and inequities found in communities worldwide, including racial, gender and financial, and highlighted the critical need for global solidarity and multilateralism to drive a fair and just response that reaches all. This discussion, to be chaired by Minouche Shafik, Director of LSE, will explore the human and economic value of health with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, and Mariana Mazzucato, the Chair of the newly formed WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All. It will also demonstrate the need for investing in a wide range of essential sectors, from preparedness and universal health coverage to equitable delivery of vaccines, in order to enable people to attain the highest levels of health and wellbeing, and for countries and economies to be able both thrive as well as withstand shocks caused by health crises like COVID-19. Meet our speakers and chair Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) is the Director-General of the World Health Organization and was elected to the post in May 2017. Dr Tedros is the first WHO Director-General to have been elected from multiple candidates by the World Health Assembly, and is the first person from the WHO African Region to serve in the role. After taking office, Dr Tedros outlined five key priorities for the Organization: universal health coverage; health emergencies; women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health; health impacts of climate and environmental change; and a transformed WHO. Prior to his election, Dr Tedros served as Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012–2016, and Minister of Health from 2005–2012. Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). She is the author of three highly acclaimed books: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy and Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. She advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable growth. Clare Wenham (@clarewenham) is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at LSE. She specialises in global health security, the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response. She has researched this for over a decade, through influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her research poses questions of global governance, the role of WHO and World Bank, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control. More recently she has been examining the role of women in epidemics and associated policy. For COVID-19, Clare is Co-Principal Investigator on a grant from the CIHR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation analysing the gendered dimensions of the outbreak. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.