-
The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All calls for joint effort to provide therapeutics, diagnostics, and other essential health supplies
-
Calls for the re-imagining of health innovations to meet challenges
The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All has made an impassioned appeal to both the public and private sectors to work hand-in-hand in order to deliver needed vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and other essential health supplies that are available equitably to those who can benefit.
According to a statement issued by the WHO, the body recommended both immediate and long-term action, urging all stakeholders to work towards creating a health innovation ecosystem characterized by purpose-driven and symbiotic public-private partnerships that put the common good front and center.
“Mobilizing money to throw at solutions that fail to address the underlying causes of longstanding structural problems will not be sufficient,” according to the Council Brief. “We all must look forward towards re-imagining health innovation as part of a new economic ecosystem that can deliver Health for All.”
The Council has made clear that just patching up the existing system will not work. Deep change is needed on how intellectual property rights are governed to drive collective intelligence, how corporate governance is structured, and how the benefits of public investments are shared to avoid the current dynamic of sharing risks but privatizing rewards.
The Council has urged immediate action in providing vaccine doses for all, technology transfer and building manufacturing capacity to be supported and financed, not as “the responsibility or property of any single actor, but as a collective responsibility towards building health greater health security and resilience in all regions, governed as common goods.”
It also urged that knowledge should not be kept as privatized intellectual property under monopoly control but considered collective rewards from a collective value creation process to be openly shared and exchanged.