WPC Health

Opening

Global Governance and Public Health

Plenary session 1

The Lessons of Covid-19

The key question is whether the WHO’s present statutes allow it to adequately meet the global health governance challenge. This is a thorny issue, comparable to arms control in that it entitles the international community to look into the domestic affairs of States.

Plenary session 2

Technology, Economics, Health Ethics

Neither technology nor the economy should be reduced to the digital dimension. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic has raised awareness of the extreme delocalization, during decades of liberal globalization, of the manufacturing of even the most common medicines. Today this raises serious geopolitical and even geostrategic issues that must be thoroughly analyzed.

Plenary session 3

Mental Health and Addiction

Mental health conditions constitute a major group of NCDs, with ties to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. Yet throughout the last few decades, programs addressing a range of mental illnesses have been woefully under-supported and under-funded, often due to stigmatization and a lack of trained mental health workers in many countries.

Closing