2020 Conference proceedings

09:00 – 09:30 | Opening

Global Governance and Public Health

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

We are living through the greatest of all shocks since the beginning of the WPC, COVID-19, which probably belongs to the highest category of conceivable shocks. As a result, we will have to introduce health as a fundamental subject in all the discussions and reflections about the future of global governance.

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Director-General of the WHO

The pandemic has shown us that international cooperation is the only solution to an international crisis. Working together might not always be easy, but it is essential. We must rethink and strengthen multilateralism to address the pressing challenges of our world in a coordinated and coherent way.

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09:30 – 11:30 | Session 1

The lessons of COVID-19

Michel Kazatchkine

Special Advisor to the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Against a certain lack of interest in certain health issues that has prevailed in recent years, the world is now realizing how much among all global issues, it is health in the short-term that has the greatest potential for disruption in our globalized world.

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Antoine Flahault

Director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva

In a collaboration between the University of Geneva and the two engineering schools of Zürich and Lausanne (ETHZ and EPFL), we provide on a dashboard […] with daily updates of COVID-19 forecasts for 209 countries and territories.

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Debate 1

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Alexandre de Germay

Senior Vice President Global Head of Cardiovascular and Established Products at Sanofi

Overhauling healthcare systems is an onerous undertaking – and requires many actors engaging in concert behind common or complementary objectives. But the COVID-19 crisis has shown us that it is possible to effect wide and large-scale change […]

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Jean Kramarz

Head of Business Line Health at Axa Partners

The purpose of Insurance is to cover for unexpected events in a predictable, measurable environment. COVID-19 taught us in a hard way that the Health environment was less predictable and measurable than we all thought.

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Juliette Tuakli

Medical Director, Chief Executive Officer of Family, Child & Associates, Chair of the Board of Trustees of United Way Worldwide

Agile coherent leadership was noted in the most COVID-19 resilient African nations. Whilst there was some politicization of COVID-19 management, as in other parts of the world, Africa fared much better than feared.

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Elhadj As Sy

Co-chair of the WHO/World Bank Global Pandemic Preparedness Monitoring Board, Chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation Board

This time, we are being reminded that perhaps we should not go back to normal because normal has not worked.

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Debate 2

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11:30 – 13-30 | Session 2

Technology, Economics, Health Ethics

Introduction

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Jacques Biot

Board Member and Advisor to companies in the field of digital transformation and artificial intelligence, former President of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris

Innovation in the field is still mostly science and technology driven, a favorable feature to provide disruptive remedies to some major health issues, but which allows for no reasonable marketplace to reconcile demand with supply and rationalize economic flows.

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Alexandra Prieux

President of Alcediag, Founder of SkillCell

The extensive use of technologies permanently changes medical practice as well as the role of the doctor who becomes more and more a technology user. Alongside with the progresses carried by technologies come new challenges that will need to be overcome.

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Debate 1

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Daniel Andler

Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University, Member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences

Over the last three decades health technologies have produced a steady flux of revolutionary inventions, disrupting established practices and common understandings of some basic ethical and anthropological notions. Hence the need for guidelines, which provide a legible representation of the ethical and legal issues which allows agents in the field to navigate the situations they encounter daily.

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Arthur Stril

Chief Business Officer and member of the Executive Committee of Cellectis

The 21st century will be the century of biology and medicine, fuelled by the rapid accumulation of biological engineering breakthroughs such as viral vectors, gene editing, and reproductive medicine, which are drastically reshaping human healthcare. But does the end justify such technological means?

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Debate 2

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Patrick Nicolet

Capgemini’s Group Chief Technology Officer

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) form the backbone of our societies, but their usage so far has been centered on short-term convenience slowly taking a toll on the Earth finite resources. In this context, what if the most pressing healthcare challenge for mankind isn’t COVID-19 itself but a deeper transformation of our individual and collective practices and behaviors through planet-centric design.

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Carlos Moreira

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WISeKey, former United Nations Expert on Cybersecurity and Trust Models

We must rethink the way the internet is built in order to unleash the potential of technology for healthcare as this sector is still mainly an analogue sector waiting to be digitally transformed.

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Conclusion

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14:30 – 16:00 | Session 3

Mental Health and Addiction

Introduction

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Michael van den Berg

Health Economist and Policy Analyst at the OECD

Slowly but surely, a paradigm shift is taking place in the way we think about healthcare, with a focus on the people who use it. Policymakers, academics, healthcare providers and patients are joining forces to make health systems more people-centered.

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Roberto Burioni

Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan

Together with a pandemic caused by the new coronavirus, we must face a second pandemic, made of fake news that are widely circulated and believed by the general population.

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Jean-Pierre Lablanchy

Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist, member of the Supervisory Board of Edeis

Mental health issues that have emerged for some time in the public debate are not new, but COVID-19 contributed to exacerbate some of them.

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Debate

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Conclusion

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