Governing health innovation for the common good - The WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All - Council Brief No. 1

Overview

This is a re-edition of the 9 June 2021 version of the Council Brief no. 1.

More than twice as many people have died from Covid-19 in 2021 than during the whole of 2020, despite having highly effective vaccines and other technologies available to control the disease. Yet access to breakthrough health innovation has been highly inequitable, which is not only a moral failure but also contributes to prolonging the pandemic. In the face of the biggest health, social and economic crisis of our lifetime, business-as-usual prevailed for health innovation: socializing risks and investments through publicly financed research, while privatizing the gains and ownership over resulting knowledge and technologies through intellectual property monopolies.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The Council’s first brief lays out how health innovation must be governed for the common good to deliver Health for All. This means radically reorienting health innovation to prioritize people’s health needs and adopt collective intelligence, knowledge sharing, and technology dissemination globally. It means establishing a new, end-to-end health innovation ecosystem that shapes the way in which public and private sectors work together into symbiotic partnerships to deliver equitable access as primary purpose. Fixing market failures and charitable efforts are insufficient to deliver vaccine equity. To end the pandemic and build back better, bold change is needed.